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.

When I was a grad student in neuroscience, I really wanted to study the things that were the most cool, the cutting-edge tools,

the interesting questions about the brain. And I found myself gravitating towards one particular

technique that really wasn't available anywhere other than UCLA where I was located. We were recording

the activity of individual neurons in the human hippocampus.

And I have to admit that when it comes to electrophysiology and that component of neuroscience,

there weren't a lot of women in the field.

There were just a couple of us in the lab.

And if you looked at all the authors on the seminal papers, very few were female identifying.

But there was one person who stood out, Wendy Suzuki. Her work was just amazing. It was

incredibly rigorous. It was really interesting. It was really well written. If her name was on a

conference program, you knew that was one you wanted to go to.

I really looked up to her and I saw her as an example that maybe women could actually thrive in that

particular field. But then, a few years ago, it seemed like her research program shifted direction.

Instead of studying the details of neural activity in the

human hippocampus or the primate hippocampus, she started asking questions about how exercise

influences the brain. And it was such a drastic shift that I wondered what happened. And then across my desk came her latest book, Good Anxiety,

harnessing the power of the most misunderstood emotion. And in it, she describes exactly what happened,

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