Gelastic Seizures on BPS

It's an emotional world. 

Big Picture Science, the SETI Institute's weekly radio show, put together an delightful, informative, surprising, and funny program this week on the neuroscience of emotion. Molly Bentley did a good job interviewing me about gelastic (laughing) epilepsy and Capgras delusion, but there are also great interviews with Paul Ekman, Jonah Lehrer, Rachel Herz, and Kathleen Bogart. Find the entire hour-long program here or just listen to Bentley's interview with me here.

Big Picture on BMI

This week's Big Picture Science examines brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). Guests include engineer of the tiny Jan Rabaey, at the Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses, who is developing wireless micro-electrode grids that can send signals out of human brains;  Human Connectome researcher Arthur Toga,  a UCLA cartographer of human brain function; UCSF neuroscientist Brad Voytek, who studies attention and memory in ECoG-implanted epilepsy patients; and senior UCSC neurobiologist Michael Gazzaniga, author of the recent book Who's In Charge?: Free Will and the Brain. The interviews are excellent, and the show opens up with my 13-year-old son Leo and me playing Mind Flex, an EEG-based game that we got for Christmas.