Brain Health Podcast

What does it mean to have a healthy brain? Is brain training possible and how?Instead of focusing on a particular topic, in this episode Kim and Alessia discuss brain health in general - how we know if we possess it, what we need to protect it from, and most importantly, how to take good care of it. A long-time brain health enthusiast and an entrepreneur in the domain of digital healthcare for brain disorders, Kim has a lot to share regarding the topic - current statistics on most common...

How is the neuroscience research community responding to its increasing societal importance? Why is international cooperation essential to its progress? What can an aspiring neuroscientist hope for? FENS (Federation of European Neuroscience Societies) is an organization trying to offer answers to questions like those. Founded in 1998, FENS has since then grown into a huge network representing 22 000 scientists in 33 European countries. They facilitate knowledge exchange and application, ...

What does depression do to our brain and can antidepressants help? This topic, abound with misconceptions and controversy, is becoming more relevant as depressive disorder climbs on the list of greatest health burdens.To find out what current research is showing, Kim and Alessia talk to Eero Castren, a professor at the University of Helsinki and a principal investigator at the Neuroscience Center there. A trained medical doctor with a PhD in neuropharmacology, our guest has a remarkable...

1 in 3 people will at some point in their life suffer from a brain disorder, according to the Global Burden of Disease report and this number might be growing. Understanding these conditions has, therefore, become more important than ever.Donna Walsh, a patient advocate, tells us about daily challenges of people suffering from brain diseases and neurological conditions, including productivity issues and mental illness stigma. She also discusses the broader socioeconomic implications, and the ...

Is work in the world of digital technology really easier than hard manual work? Or is it just that we do not yet truly understand the nature and consequences of cognitive fatigue?To answer these and many other questions concerning workers of the digital age, the BrainHealth Podcast team interviews Max L. Wilson, Assistant Professor at the School of Computer Science, Nottingham University. Wilson comes from the emerging field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and is especially interested in ...

Thanks to pop culture, dopamine is commonly associated with pleasure-seeking and addiction, but its function goes way beyond that. Despite the fact that only about 400 000 out of 10 billion neurons in our brain produce it, the importance of natural dopamine for our survival is tremendous. It is responsible for us making a difference between what is good and what is bad for us, our ability to compare expectations to reality, but also for basic functions like physical movement. And it’s no...

The phrase psychological trauma can be roughly translated as “the wound of the soul”. Contemporary neuropsychology shows us that the wound is not metaphorical, as this poetic-sounding phrase might suggest, but rather a real one, detectable in the brain’s neural networks. To understand what these wounds look like, how we acquire them, and what we can do about them, the Brain Health podcast team interviews a practitioner of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR), Isab...

In this episode of the Brain Health podcast, Alessia and Kim talk to Jo Solet, a sleep researcher. Together, they delve into the mysteries of sleep, its significance, and ways to improve brain health through sleep. Jo Solet, PhD., is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a trained clinician and researcher. Throughout her fruitful career, she has worked with Cambridge Health Alliance and Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is known fo...

Brain disorders are becoming more and more prevalent in the population. Kim’s and Alessia’s guest - Frédéric Destrebecq, executive director of European Brain Council (EBC) - is here to tell us about how society can cope with this tendency, discussing prevention and treatment of brain diseases as well as topics like effects of depression, mental illness stigma, stress disorders and burnout syndrome. European Brain Council is a non-profit organization that brings together patient ass...

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a central nervous system disorder that an estimated 2.3 million people around the globe live with. To help us understand this often unpredictable condition and life with it, we interview Alexandre Guedes da Silva, the director and vice-president of Multiple Sclerosis Society of Portugal (SPEM). SPEM is a member organization of the broader European Multiple Sclerosis Platform (EMSP), an association founded in 1989 in order to make sure the patients with multiple...