This is Cognitive Revolution, my show about the personal side of the intellectual journey. Each week, I interview an eminent scientist, writer, or academic about the experiences that shaped their ideas. The show is available wherever you listen to podcasts.
This week's guest is neuroscientist, filmmaker, and inimitable personality Sade Abiodun. She is a first year PhD student the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and her latest film project was Godspeed. This short film has done well on the festival circuit, and Sade was a finalist for the highly selective Sundance fellowship. In this episode, we talk about the difficulties of starting grad school, especially while a world-wide pandemic is in progress. In particular, we talk about balancing grad school projects with non-grad school projects (e.g., filmmaking, podcasting), and the opportunity for reinvention of identity that beginning a new program offers. We also talk about the connection between neuroscience and film, in using experimental paradigms with naturalistic stimuli. We try our best to get #neurocinematics to become a cultural phenomenon. Finally, we talk about a paper Sade wrote a couple years back on academia and race, a conversation which has -- how should I put this? -- been brought up with renewed fervor over the past few months. She summarizes the perspective she gave in that paper and how it might be updated in response to current events.
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#32: Sade Abiodun