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What happens in a musician's brain when they play music? Why do some people love roller coasters but others hate them? Do our surroundings actually impact our focus? Neuroscience students, Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur, discuss everyday topics and situations through a neuroscience lens. Join us as we bridge the synapse.
A blanket fort is the studio while Anu and Madeline explain your gut's 'second brain'.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A farewell about permission, mistakes, and choosing the next step when the planned route no longer fits.
The final episode turns into a clear-eyed look at how Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur found their way into podcasting together. It follows the show from Anu's Brain Rules column at The Daily Beacon into a shared project built through trial, error, and the choice to keep going…
A clear neuroscience-led look at stress, from fear circuitry to the pressure of other people's milestones.
Stress gets a useful reset here, as the episode separates the word's everyday meaning from the way it is used by neuroscience researchers, psychiatrists, and family doctors.
Heartbreak is traced through reward circuitry, animal behavior, and the brain's tactile pathways.
Bridging the Synapse treats heartbreak as something the brain can start to chart, with Dana Leo connecting love, separation, and experience-dependent plasticity to reward circuitry and animal studies that make the ideas feel concrete.
A former barista connects coffee culture with the brain science behind feeling awake while still needing sleep.
Coffee gives this episode a clean way into a bigger question: how a familiar daily drink changes the brain, and why the culture around it matters.
A conversational look at how a cold's immune response can blur alertness and thinking.
A common cold opens into a clear, conversational tour of the brain at work, as Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur follow what can happen after a virus enters the body.
A Halloween discussion that treats fear as protection, habit, and a warning system worth understanding.
Fear gets a clear, useful reframing in Bridging the Synapse's Halloween episode, which moves from the body's fight-or-flight response into the more personal reasons fear depends on experience and a person's relationship to a stimulus.
Careful conversations on drugs, treatment, and recovery.
Buddhist practice for the predictive brain.
Long conversations with people who think in systems.
Psychedelics, treated with care and context.
Behavioural science with a commercial pulse.
Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur close Bridging the Synapse by recounting how Anu’s Brain Rules column at The Daily Beacon became a podcast and how Madeline joined after emailing her from Spain.
Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur distinguish evolutionary stress, linked to survival and reproduction, from everyday stress involving finances, deadlines, sleep, and social expectations.
The hosts interview a PhD candidate about experience-dependent plasticity in the brain and Rett syndrome.
Bridging the Synapse examines coffee through neuroscience, culture, labor, and personal memory with hosts Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur and guest Gabe Taylor.
Bridging the Synapse hosts Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur explain how viral infections, cytokines, and immune responses relate to common-cold symptoms and mental fog.
Madeline MacArthur and Anu Kumar explain fear as sympathetic-nervous-system activation involving fight-or-flight, elevated heart rate, and blood redirected toward the arms and legs.
The hosts discuss the neuroscience behind procrastination and introduce study techniques to help college students manage their workload and reduce anxiety.
Anu Kumar and Madeline MacArthur explain why the enteric nervous system is called a “second brain” while stressing that it is neither sentient nor equivalent to the brain in the skull.
Madeline McArthur and Anu Kumar explain how students become familiar with unfamiliar campuses, towns, jobs, and homes, drawing on their transitions to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.