You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

This is a podcast that explores the space where science and society collide.

We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it

matters. Over the last few decades, there's been a huge shift in terms of how we think about

people who aren't like us, people whose brains are

just different. Thanks to the pioneering work of people like Oliver Sacks and Steve Silberman,

we now understand that it doesn't really make sense anymore to talk about a normal brain or an

average brain. Sometimes we still use the word typical to describe

the brains of most people. But what if there's no such thing as the brains of most people?

What if the whole concept needs to be tossed out? Well, in this episode, I talked to

cognitive neuroscientist Chantelle Pratt. She's a professor at the

University of Washington. She has appointments in the departments of psychology, neuroscience,

linguistics, and the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. So her work is really interdisciplinary.

But that's not the only pioneering thing about her. She's also been studying the biological

bases of individual differences in cognition for the better part of the last couple decades.

When a lot of cognitive neuroscientists thought there was really no future in individual differences,

Chantelle kept going on. And now she's written a book about it, capturing her research along with those of others.

It's called the neuroscience of you, how every brain is different and how to understand yours.

Now, I want to give you fair warning and say that this interview gets a little bit inside baseball

when it comes to neuroscience. But I just couldn't help myself. I'm so excited about this

...