Welcome to the Brain Science Podcast, the show for everyone who has a brain. I'm your host Dr. Ginger Campbell.

This is episode 125 and it is our ninth annual review episode.

The goal of the Brain Science Podcast is to explore how recent

discoveries in neuroscience are helping to unravel the mystery of how our brains

make us who we are.

In this episode, I'm going to be going back over some of the key ideas and topics that we have discussed in 2015.

This year I released 10 new episodes and talked with eight guests including philosophers, clinicians, and basic scientists.

We discussed eight different books.

After I review these key ideas, I will talk a little bit about what to expect in 2016,

and then I will close by giving you a little information about how you can help keep the brain science

podcast going. We started out the year in episode 115 by talking with Dr. Evan Thompson about his new book Waking, Dreaming Being, Self and Consciousness in

Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy.

This is the second time that Dr. Thompson has been on the brain science podcast. I talked to him back in

episode 89 when we talked about his last book, Mind in Life, but Evan Thompson is probably best known as a co-author of The Embodied Mind, which was one of the pioneering books that helped to launch the field that is now known as embodied cognition.

In his new book, Waking, Dreaming Being, Dr. Thompson gives us a very deep discussion of how Eastern philosophy of mind and Western

neuroscience can challenge and inform one another. It's not an easy one to summarize,

but I think that the key question that Thompson addresses in this book

is,

what do these different states of consciousness tell us about the mind

and the process by which our brains generate our sense of self.

He does this by comparing what Eastern meditation-based traditions say to the discoveries

of Western neuroscience.

...