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The Story Collider

Anti-Love: Stories about heartbreak and break ups

The Story Collider

Story Collider, Inc.

Performing Arts, Society & Culture, Arts, Personal Journals, Science

4.4824 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Valentine’s Day may be all about couples, but this week’s episode celebrates heartbreak, breakups, and proudly being single as a Pringle.

Part 1: Getting dumped is the push psychologist Jiawen Huang needs to step outside his comfort zone.

Part 2: While completing her PhD in neuroscience, Leslie Sibener is determined to fix her relationship. 

Jiawen Huang obtained his PhD in Psychology from Columbia University, where he studied how prior knowledge provides a scaffold for prediction and memory. He grew up in China, and did his undergrad at University College London where he scanned people watching movies in fMRI scanner. In his free time, he can be found dancing salsa, practicing Spanish, and whittling wood carvings, all of which he started doing this past year.

Leslie Sibener is a neuroscientist and science communicator based in New York City. She received degrees in Neuroscience and Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD at Columbia University where she studied movement and motor learning. Now as a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University, Leslie researches the mechanisms that allow specific memories to be stored for long term memory in the brain, while others are forgotten. She has always been passionate about sharing science outside of the lab. This has manifested in being the group leader the science writing group NeuWrite, a team member of Stories of WiN, and founder of Scientist on the Subway. Additionally, she has collaborated with a variety other groups, such as BioBus, Facts Machine Podcast, and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, to engage the public with science.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

A science story, huh?

0:04.0

Is NYU scientists the...

0:06.0

I felt...

0:07.0

I was really strong.

0:08.0

And I just thought, well...

0:10.0

It was that golden moment.

0:13.0

Because science was on my side.

0:15.0

Hey, everyone. Hey everyone, welcome to the story clutter, where true personal stories about science help us to discover how weird and wonderful it is to exist in this world and be a human.

0:32.6

I'm your host, Misha Gayevsky, and I know tomorrow is Valentine's Day, but today isn't.

0:36.9

And this episode is for everyone

0:38.4

who isn't coupled up. And if you are coupled up and miserable, I hope this episode inspires

0:43.9

you to leave that relationship and embrace singleddom. Our first story is from psychologist Yawin

0:49.3

Huang. His story is recorded in July last year at our go-to spot, caveat in New York City.

0:55.0

Here's Yawin.

1:03.8

I met him in spring break last year in Puerto Rico.

1:09.9

My friend was supposed to go with me, but she ditched me.

1:13.6

And solo traveling was way out of my comfort zone that I would have canceled, if not because of a

1:18.3

gentle push from science. So a few months before that spring break, I had started learning Spanish

1:24.1

because my research was not going well and I wanted to do something

1:27.8

that will at least bring me some results after I put in the effort and then right

1:33.0

before that spring break I had also submitted in my second paper of my PhD to a new

1:37.2

journal the paper looks at how we remember events that were not predicted but in

...

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