Cocaine and Memory

Top of Mind with Julie Rose • Season 1, Episode 235, Segment 6

Feb 18, 2016 • 19m

Guest: Barbara Sorg, PhD, Professor of Neuroscience at Washington State University Vancouver Sometimes our standard scale for measuring, or describing, things just isn’t sufficient. Well that’s what cocaine does to memory, says Dr. Barbara Sorg.

Other Segments

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Guest: Jeffrey Hunger, Doctoral Student in UC Santa Barbara’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences Bring up the term “BMI” in a group of people with variety of body sizes and fitness habits, and you better brace yourself for some backlash. The measure of Body Mass Index is used by dieticians and fitness trainers and even health insurance companies to assess how overweight or obese a person is. It’s very controversial. And may just be very wrong, as well.

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Guest: Suresh Venkatasubramanian, PhD, Associate Professor in the University of Utah’s School of Computing It’s common these days for HR departments in large companies to use computer programs to cull through thousands of job applications and make the initial cut. It’s efficient and seemingly less subject to the subtle bias of humans. Except, maybe not that last part. A team of researchers has found algorithms can be just as biased as human beings.

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Guest: Sandra Buys, MD, Medical Director of the High Risk Breast Cancer Clinic at Huntsman Cancer Institute and Professor in the University of Utah School of Medicine You couldn’t have missed the news last spring of a rather private nature: actress and director Angelina Jolie Pitt announced in a New York Times column that she’d had her ovaries removed. The surgery came two years after she opted for a double mastectomy. Both procedures were prompted by a test that revealed Jolie Pitt had inherited a defect in the BRCA1 gene.