Jessamyn Fairfield

speaker

401 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 30 Aug

Jessamyn Fairfield’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 — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Futureproof with Jonathan McCrea · Did we find evidence of life on Mars in the 1970’s? · 30 Aug 2026 podcast

Um there's this really famous kind of dichotomy um which is called the Cartesian theater and thinking about, you know, if you're trying to solve well, how does the brain work?

And your fundamental description of how the brain works is that you put a little guy in it who's making your decisions for you, it's like, well, you didn't really answer anything there.

You just put you put another brain inside your brain and you're like, that's it, that guy makes my decisions.

And it's like, but who makes who makes his decisions?

And the gist of this paper is it's actually really hard to describe that.

It's lots of

interacting networks um that are underlying something like decision making, even if it feels to us like we are a a discrete person that is making those decisions.

part

if there was a little guy pulling levers, we would know about it by now.

But it's a lot messier than that.

That's right.

And specifically the way that the brain does or doesn't make new neurons.

So for a long time, the uh medical model of depression in terms of how this works, you know, at a cellular level in the brain, was very focused on things like dopamine surtrally and like getting enough of these chemicals that give us positive signals in the brain.

And there's new research from Columbia University that's showing that there actually might be an element to this as well.

of where new neurons are actually showing up or not.

Now, people especially listening to this program probably know that, you know, when you're born, when you're a little tiny baby, you have a huge number of neurons.

You have a hundred billion neurons, but you're also a little tiny baby, you're not very good at doing stuff.

So you sort of flail around for a while over the first 10 years or so of your life.

Uh those connections are selectively pruned so that you get better at doing stuff, but you have fewer neurons.

There are actually very few places in the brain as an adult where you make new neurons.

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