Interacting Minds – Details, episodes & analysis

In the episode of this season we will discuss how religion, devotion and love can be intertwined. Postdoctoral Fellow Renée L. Ford shares her expertise in Tibetan Buddhism and how can love and devotion manifest itself.

Produced by Kirsi Tilk
Music by Simon Karg
Find more information at interactingminds.au.dk/podcast

In this episode we will dig deep into cave art, early human behavior, meaning making and what can we find looking back to these primordial times.  Here to guide us are Izzy Wisher and Kristian Tylén from the eSYMb project.

Produced by Kirsi Tilk
Music by Simon Karg
Find more information at interactingminds.au.dk/podcast

Consciousness, despite millennia of heated debate, remains one of the most puzzling phenomena to humankind. Theories are vast and continue to evolve with new technologies and fields of study. Yet, what happens when we move away from the theoretical discourse and enter a clinical setting where our conception of consciousness has critical implications to the lives and survival of patients at the borderlands of living. 

Lise Marie Andersen (Interacting Minds Centre & Region Midtjylland) & Bess Boelsbjerg (Interacting Minds Centre, Heart openings) have joined us this week to dig deeper into the research of the Borderlands of Living project. We explore their interdisciplinary research with clinicians trying to understand how to best treat patients with Disorders of Consciousness. How do we enact and assess consciousness when patients are not able to communicate with us? How are personhood and consciousness related to each other in this liminal space? And what uncertainties can new technologies bring?

To learn more about the Borderlands of Living project and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the show notes for this episode and listen to: 

• Research * Clinical Practice: Exploring the Borderlands of Living (Mette Terp Høybye) for an overview over the research project
• Research * Clinical Practice: Explainable AI at the Borderlands of Living (Lise Marie Andersen & Alberte Seeberg)

Clinicians tending to unresponsive patients with serious brain injuries face critical end-of-life decisions. They must decide to continue or withdraw life-sustaining treatment based on the best available knowledge and resources. Looking into the future, can researchers aid this decision making process by designing supportive computational tools? And if yes, what considerations should they keep in mind?

Lise Marie Andersen (Interacting Minds Centre & Region Midtjylland) & Alberte Seeberg (Center for Music in the Brain) have stopped by this week to help us dig deeper into the research of the Borderlands of Living project. We get to talk about the intricacies of explainable AI in prognostic assessments for patients with Disorders of Consciousness and the role of accuracy, transparency,  and uncertainty in designing a meaningful prognostic assessment tool to aid clinicians in their decision making. 

To learn more about the Borderlands of Living project and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the show notes for this episode and listen to: 

• Research * Clinical Practice: Exploring the Borderlands of Living (Mette Terp Høybye) for an overview over the research project
• Research * Clinical Practice: Understanding personhood and consciousness at the Borderlands of Living (Bess Boelsbjerg and Lise Marie Andersen) 

Wearable technologies have become increasingly prevalent in our daily lives. From tracking running times to monitoring stress, pulse and breathing — little in our life is left untracked. But what can all this data tell us? Could we gain new knowledge about human physiology and behaviour by drawing on information gained through wearable technologies in an ethical and responsible way? 

Psychologist Christine Parsons (Director of the Interacting Minds Centre) has joined us this week to discuss wearable technologies, their impact on people, and their use in her research to understand topics such as sleep, mental health, and mindfulness. 

To learn more about Christine Parson's research and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the show notes for this episode.

Mette Terp Høybye (Interacting Minds Centre & Silkeborg Regional Hospital) takes us along to the boundaries of consciousness and shares with us insights from her interdisciplinary research group Borderlands of Living that has spent the last 3 years empirically studying the high-stake relationship and uncertainties between clinical practice and research practice  in the prognostic assessment of unresponsive patients with serious brain injuries. 

Examining these intersections of reasoning between clinic and research, we reflect together on how insights from this work can inform and affect our understanding of responsiveness, consciousness and personhood.

To learn more about the Borderlands of Living project and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the show notes for this episode and take a deeper dive into the work of Borderlands of Living by listening to coming episodes on the topic.

What is the role of interdisciplinary and social science research in navigating a global pandemic? Computational Linguist Rebekah Baglini & Political Psychologist Michael Bang Petersen (Interacting Minds Centre) have stopped by this week to talk about the HOPE project — the largest Danish social science research project on the COVID epidemic. 

We unpack HOPE’s interdisciplinary efforts to engage in data-gathering and rapid on-going analyses since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020 and explore how HOPE has navigated finding meaningful ways to interact and share their analyses with national authorities, media outlets, and the general public.

To learn more about the HOPE project and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the show notes for this episode.

Constructivist Designer, Educator and Researcher Amos Blanton (Interacting Minds Centre & Dokk1, Aarhus Public Library) joins us this episode to talk about tinkering, play, and the adjacent possibilities that come with it. 

We talk about past endeavours - running the Scratch online community, designing learning through play experiences in LEGO House, founding the LEGO Idea Studio, and co-developing the vision for the Scintillae Research Atelier - and then move to Amos current research on Collective Creativity and how solar art machines offer wonderful opportunities to invite collaborative creativity, shared decision making and cultural transmission.

To learn more about Amos Blanton’s work and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the  show notes for this episode at https://interactingminds.au.dk/podcast

Interdisciplinary scholar Ingela Visuri (Dalarna University & Interacting Minds Centre) has come over from Sweden to talk about her new research project that explores  to what extent educational live action role playing (eduLARP) contributes to social and theoretical learning in autistic youths.

We revisit the epiphany that started her research career while a religion studies teacher at a Secondary School in Sweden and follow her path as a curious mixed-methods scholar to the present day. 

To learn more about Ingela Visuri’s work and the topics and resources mentioned in this episode, visit the show notes at https://interactingminds.au.dk/podcast. 

Play Researcher Marc Malmdorf Andersen (Interacting Minds Centre & Recreational Fear Lab) has stopped by to talk about his cognitive theory of play, recreational fear, dark play, and why sweet spots of surprise could be at the core of making sense of why humans of all ages play. 

We also get to talk about some of Marc’s past and future research endeavours: Studying senses of agency in Ouija Board sessions, asking participants to detect beings in a virtual reality forest, and using a range of empirical methods to study people voluntarily seeking out frightening experiences in a haunted house. 

To learn more about Marc Malmdorf Andersen’s  work and the topics and resources mentioned, visit the  show notes for this episode at https://interactingminds.au.dk/podcast