Cara Santa Maria

speaker

5,391 appearances 15 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 2d ago

Cara Santa Maria’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 4.

Appearances

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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe · The Skeptics Guide #872 - Mar 26 2022 podcast

Let's see if there's any changes. voice-verified

And what they found was that on average, there was a significant difference in the gray matter. voice-verified

And we're talking about the gray matter density, like the actual amount of gray matter. voice-verified

And of course, gray matter is like the cell bodies, the neural cell bodies where they cluster together, the squishy parts of your brain, as opposed to white matter, which are the axons and the sort of the tracks, the nerves. voice-verified

And so after COVID-19, on average, there was a significant reduction in gray matter in the parts of the brain that tend to be associated with smell. voice-verified

So let's talk about, you know, and we know that COVID affects smell. voice-verified

And just a couple weeks ago, I did a story about what's actually happening at the kind of cellular level, right? voice-verified

And the genetic level. voice-verified

They found that reduction in gray matter thickness in both the orbitofrontal cortex and the parahippocampal gyrus. voice-verified

Now, both of these areas are involved in smell. voice-verified

They're also involved in a hell of a lot of other stuff. voice-verified

But yes, they're involved in smell. voice-verified

They also found actual markers of tissue damage voice-verified

in regions that are actually physically connected to the primary olfactory cortex, so the main kind of smelling cortex in the brain. voice-verified

And they did find, on average, that the brains of people post-COVID were reduced in size. voice-verified

Everybody? voice-verified

Yeah. voice-verified

So that's what I'm saying. voice-verified

They took out the 15 hospitalized patients and then reanalyzed and they still found those things to hold true. voice-verified

But what do you think happened in the media when this paper was published? voice-verified

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