
Show Notes
What are executive functions and why are they so important? In this episode of the podcast, world-renowned neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen unpacks how executive functions drive everything over the course of our lives, allowing us to create and retrieve memories, understand our own and others’ emotions, plan our short and long-term goals, and much more. Drawing on gripping case studies and cutting-edge research, Adrian maps out the architecture of our brains and these executive functions, revealing the importance of them to both the potential of our brains and to our very ways of being. Adrian also provides practical advice to maintain our executive functions at every stage of our lives.
Join us for a remarkable picture of both the brain’s brilliance and its fragility, and a closer understanding of what it is that makes each of us human.
Join us live! How To Academy hosts world-renowned artists, thinkers, and leaders live on stage across the UK and USA. Find out who’s appearing near you at howtoacademy.com.
Become a Member: How To Plus members receive £15 off every live event ticket, free access to biweekly livestreams, and an exclusive members-only podcast. Find out more at howtoacademy.com/htasubscribe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from How To Academy Podcast
On 1 February, 1910, vivacious music-hall performer, Belle Elmore, suddenly vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends– the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild– who demanded an immediate investigation. They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect: Belle’s husband, medical fraudster, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve.
One of the most remarkable and progressive physicians of the Victorian age, Dr Joseph Bell's incredible powers of deductive reasoning astonished his students -- including the young Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford-trained medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals what Sherlock Holmes owes to the work of a real life crime-solving surgeon, and how he came, like Conan Doyle, to finally resent his association with Baker Street's most famous resident. Join us for a journey into the smog-wreathed streets of Edinburgh for a tale of true crime, bloody medicine, literary genius, and the convergence of art and life.
Author and journalist Naomi Klein and writer and activist Astra Taylor join Historian David Olusoga to explore how apocalyptic visions of the future are working to justify the present-day costs of AI – from energy and water-hungry data centres to job displacement and mass surveillance. Naomi and Astra also trace the links between religious end-times movements, ethno-nationalism, climate anxiety, and anti-immigrant politics. They make the case for how we can resist, how communities are organizing across political divides, and why material improvements in people’s lives matter.
Sometimes life can feel like a lot. Even on a good day you will experience stress and fatigue. The nature of modern living guarantees it. However, the problem is not that we think too much, but that our nervous systems are too wound up to rest.
Why is liberal democracy losing public confidence—and what would it take to renew it? Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu joins Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf to discuss.