What's Different About Women's Brains?
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2022
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate senior editor Shannon Palus is joined by author Emily Willingham. Emily’s new book The Tailored Brain: Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter is all about how our brains work and whether gender plays a role in brain enhancement. They talk about how to be more empathetic and the ways empathy can boost your brain, the importance of using a feminist lens in brain science, and the old theory that brains are made of sperm.
In the Slate Plus segment, Emily and Shannon talk about Emily’s other book, Phallacy: Life Lessons From the Animal Penis and explore why the duck vagina is like a gated community.
Recommendations:
Shannon: Wearing perfume to turn your mood around.
Emily: Lightly meditating by beholding a tree.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Shannon Palus, Susan Matthews and June Thomas.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:02.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:04.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:05.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:06.0 | This is the waves. |
| 0:07.0 | The waves. Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and this week at least, |
| 0:18.1 | brains. Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing we can't get off our |
| 0:23.5 | minds and today you've got me Shannon Paulis senior editor at Slate covering |
| 0:28.9 | science and health I have with me Emily Willingham a a science writer, I'm the author of The Tailored Brain, |
| 0:36.2 | From Ketamine to Kito to Companion ship, a user's guide to feeling better and thinking smarter. This book is fascinating to me because it |
| 0:45.2 | subtly upends a lot of common sense about what it means to be smart and about |
| 0:49.6 | what we do to be smarter. And I wanted to have Emily on this podcast because she spent a lot of time |
| 0:56.0 | thinking and writing about gender and sex. And I think it overlaps in interesting ways with how |
| 1:01.1 | we think about the brain and how she writes about it. |
| 1:03.7 | Emily, thank you so much for joining us. How's your brain today? |
| 1:08.0 | Oh my gosh, how is my brain? I don't know, you know, COVID's all around it. |
| 1:12.0 | It's not in me yet as far as I know, but certainly that's where my brain tends to spend most of its time these days. |
| 1:18.0 | How are you? |
| 1:19.0 | I am doing okay. My brain is overloaded but functioning. We're going to talk more about the |
| 1:26.2 | tailored brain with Emily right after this. For Slate Plus listeners we're going to ask her a few questions about her other book, |
| 1:33.6 | fallacy, life lessons from the animal penis. Thank you so much for listening. If you're loving the show and want to hear more, |
| 1:52.2 | subscribe to our feed. |
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