How is violence perpetuated through economic sanctions, the media, and political decisions and what real peace might look like? Join KUT’s Rebecca McInroy along with writer and the Executive Director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Yousef Munayyer, and economist James K. Galbraith to talk about understanding violence today.
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Jazz and The Art of Love
In this edition of Liner Notes Rabbi and jazz historian Neil Blumofe talks about love and its discontents.
V&B: Sonny Rollins and The Art of Power (Part II)
Rabbi and Jazz Historian Neil Blumofe in conversation with Rebecca McInroy. Musical guests include Alex Coke, saxophone; Derrick Becker, trumpet; Sean Giddings, piano; Roscoe Beck, bass; Brannen Temple, drums.
How do we respond to uncertainty and a time of anxiety? By steeping ourselves in Rollins’ confidence and steadfastness, we bear witness to the commanding power of presence. Rollins remains a persuasive poet – as a saxophonist, improviser, and as an innovating voice, he possesses a sense of adventure in exploration and intention. He tells a compelling story of the jazz ancestors, inviting us to join with him, and we step resolutely forward together as we determine the next chapters to be written.
The Placebo Effect
There are a lot of factors that help to regulate our overall health and wellness. If we are content in our lives and relationships, we are more likely to be healthy.
If we exercise and eat well, we reap the benefits in our mind and body. Also, as recent studies by Ted Kaptchuck and others show, if we take medications or supplements, even if they’re nothing but rice powder and sugar, we can feel better.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about why taking placebos somehow makes us feel healthier.
How vs. Why Knowledge
Because we know “how” things work sometimes we think we understand “why” these things work as they do, and that can be a problem.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the difference between “how” vs. “why” knowledge, and why it’s important to recognize what you really need to know.
Nostalgia
Last month on All Things Considered NPR’s Kelly McEvers and Pop Culture Happy Hour‘s Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon talked about this era of TV and movies, many of which are catering to Gen X nostalgia.
Weldon asserted that, “…the strongest nostalgia you feel is for the stuff that you chose. So in your teens and 20s, you make a decision. You make your first cultural choices. You say, this is mine.”
But is that actually true? How does our brain process memory? And what is nostalgia?
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of nostalgia and how it works in our brains.
Generosity
We give for many reasons, and most of the time it feels pretty good to help other people. But when you’re on the receiving end of generosity feelings can be mixed.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of giving and receiving.
V&B Extra-Mark Bowden
Views and Brews Extra is a podcast that brings you all the discussions we have off the Cactus stage.
On this episode, KUT’s Rebecca McInroy talks with writer and journalist Mark Bowden, National Correspondent for The Atlantic and author of Black Hawk Down: The Story of Modern War.
His latest book Hue: 1968 chronicles the story of the centerpiece of the Tet Offensive and a turning point in the American War in Vietnam.
They talk about the influence his father had on his career, what makes a good leader, and the state of journalism today.
The Psychology of Thanksgiving (Rebroadcast)
For many of us, Thanksgiving means spending time with our families, carrying out traditions that we’ve practiced for years.
While it can be very stressful, messy, and challenging to spend time with family members you don’t see very often, it can also be a beautiful time of recentering.
Traditions serve a psychological function. By repeating the same traditional activity with the same group of people over the years, we construct a chronological record of who we’ve been before – and who we are now. It’s a hidden way of staying in touch with the consistent elements of our identities, and it allows us to track ourselves as we develop and change.
Traditions give us an opportunity to become psychologically close to the person that we used to be in childhood, or adolescence – or even as recently as last year. And that’s something to be thankful for.
As always, Dr. Bob Duke and Dr. Art Markman are carving it up. Listen in the audio player above.
Reading Vs. Listening (Rebroadcast)
Have you ever told someone, “Hey, I read that book!” then continued with a guilty, “…well, I listened to the audio version.”
It’s time to wash that guilt right out of your soul, because in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about how our brains process information differently based on how we consume it.
Uncertainty and Tragedy
On a recent Views and Brews at The Cactus Cafe, Dr. Art Markman, and Dr. Bob Duke talked about how to process tragedy through media in uncertain times.
You can listen to the full conversation here, but we wanted to bring you a bit of it on this week’s edition of Two Guys on Your Head.
Math, Music, and The Brain
There are some things that just feel like they’re true. For example, the idea that people who are gifted musicians are also good at learning math, or vice versa.
However, there isn’t any data that suggests that there are any links in the brain between these proclivities. As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, we underestimate the role emotions play in what we believe to be true.
Boredom
It seems that people today carry with them the constant mantra, “I’m so busy.” And as it can be tough to juggle work, kids, and life in general, a lot of that feeling of being overwhelmed may be our own fault.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markaman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the value of boredom, and how to get the most out of your downtime to feel more in control and less stressed.
Football and Brain Injury
It can be said that ignorance is bliss, and when it came to football that was the case for our own Dr. Bob Duke. A lifelong football fan, Duke was thrown into a dilemma by a recent study done by researchers at Boston University that revealed that, “chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive, degenerative brain disease found in people with a history of repeated head trauma, may be more common among football players than previously thought.”
Knowing this, the question then became, how can a man who has dedicated his life to studying and teaching about the brain support a spectacle that is so damaging to the brain?
On this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss what it means for Bob to be a fan of football knowing what we now know.
Tomatoes: Coalition of Immokalee Workers (Ep. 29)
“The work we do is too important to the nation. We are the people who make it possible for every meal to exist. We feed the nation and we ask, have always asked, for the possibility to feed our own families in a dignified way without having to be in a vulnerable position all the time…Right now our community is in need and that is going to be the case for a while…but then the most important thing is not how to go back to normal necessarily, because normal for us it’s poor, it’s vulnerable, it’s all the things that make it really scary when hurricanes hit our area.” –Gerardo Reyes Chavez, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
When hurricane Irma hit the Florida coast in September of 2017, one place under siege was Immokalee, FL; the center of the region’s agriculture industry and home to many immigrant and migrant families, where almost 90% of the nation’s tomatoes are harvested during the winter months.
In this edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel and Tom Philpott talk with Gerardo Reyes Chavez and Julia Perkins from The Coalition of Immokalee Workers, about not only about what is needed now in the aftermath of this devastating hurricane, but also about why this population is so vulnerable, underserved, and exploited, and what they have done to transform the food industry through the Fair Food Program.
Sidney Mintz (Extended Interview)
“Most of all I would like more coming to terms with what happened…I think what needs to be done is for all of my fellow citizens in this country to understand what happened and to be able to say, this is what was done and now we must think about how to make the playing field level for all of us in this country, and by some ways for all of us eventually in the world. Because we can’t live by ignoring that past.” –Sidney Mintz
In this bonus edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel, Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy revisit the conversation with anthropologist Sidney Mintz about his seminal work “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar In Modern History.”
The interview took place in September of 2015 and later that year on December 27th Dr. Mintz passed away.
In this extended interview, Mintz not only takes us through our prehistoric relationship to sweetness–from the bloody history of slavery and sugar production to our current state of the mass production and consumption of sweetness worldwide, but he also talks about his development as an anthropologist and thinker. He discusses his time as a student of anthropology and how he was able to study in Puerto Rico, along with who was influencing his thinking at the time. He also talks about how factories developed on the sugar plantations and the way slavery developed in the New World, as well as the role this brutal past plays in current volatile racial relations in the U.S.
As hurricanes continue to wreak havoc on the Caribbean and our hearts go out to all those who are suffering, we look to Mintz for wisdom and guidance in the days ahead.
The Value of Understanding
As gratifying as applied research is, to set out to answer a specific research question, it’s not always the best way to come up with new ideas, discover new things, and develop understanding. For these things you need basic research or just a curiosity about the world and how it works.
As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about on this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, developing and valuing understanding, as opposed to the bottom line, is an important part of uncovering what we don’t even know we don’t know.
Pronouns
When it comes to language, the psychology around how we use words is as interesting and as consequential as the words themselves.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of closed classed words in English like pronouns, determiners, conjunctions, and prepositions, and why it’s so hard for us to change them.
Painkillers (Rebroadcast)
The high reliance on painkillers by the medical community has become an increasingly controversial topic. For patients, that reliance can easily transform a treatment into an addiction.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the relationship between pain and the brain. And they touch on the evolution of pain as retribution, both biologically and culturally.
Nouns
Popular linguistic theories like, Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, give us the idea that language determines how and what we think. However, looking at the psychology behind how we use language points in another direction.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how nouns can teach us a lot about how our brains create and influence how we use language.