In this educational monologue Mandy talks about what is actually going on with the dopamine hits everyone talks about these days and then ends with some practical ways to control our behaviour for better mental health and wellbeing through harnessing the power of the reward system. See also: Berridge KC, Kringelbach ML. Pleasure systems in the brai…

By Sarah and Mandy

Reflecting on what part of this experience we want to take forward...By Mike Lovas and Mandy Wintink

By Nathan Radke, Alena Papayanis, and Mandy Wintink

It’s December. Christmas season is well among us. It’s a crazy time of year for many people. Not me. But for many others. Here in this rant I talk about my process of degifting my holidays, the terribleness of commercialized Christmas, the egocentrism of Christmas, the stress and money issues around Christmas, and where is religion in all of this? …

Me… ranting about gender, gender issues, gender reveal parties, gendered clothing, gender segregation, gender neutral, gender expansion, gendered opportunities, gendered washrooms… It didn’t start out as a rant. It was going to be an introduction to two other conversations about gender I’ve had specifically around gender-expansive parenting. But 17…

Me ranting about accessibility issues and the university system. No, I’m not actually lacking compassion for people’s needs. What I’m annoyed with is why we aren’t individualizing education more. I have lots of issues with the university system and you can read about some of them in the MicroDegree Manifesto too.…

EPISODE 2: Today, I share parts of my conversation with Lindsay about what compelled into this world. I love how she starts with it’s not like they say “hey wanna join this cult and we’re gonna have this sex group?”. The recruiting process is very deliberate and calculated.By Lindsay and Mandy

I am talking with my very dear friend, Lindsay. About 8 years ago, Lindsay got involved in the now famous cult, NXIVM, lead by Keith Raniere. In June of this year (2019) Keith was convicted of federal crimes including sex trafficking, conspiracy, and conspiracy to commit forced labor. His sentencing is at the end of October, 2019. I have been talki…

Alia and I speak for the first time during this conversation. We were introduced through email by a mutual friend, Paul, who we both know from CSI (Centre for Social Innovation). Paul connected us because Alia is interested in co-living and because my partner and I bought a house in Toronto with our friends and are in a co-living situation. We talk…

If you want to sit in on a class presentation on the research related to bisexuality please listen to this podcast! Vanessa is a MicroMasters student (part of the Centre for Applied Neuroscience MicroDegree in Psychological Neuroscience) supervised by me, Mandy Wintink. This week’s seminar class was on Sex and Gender and Vanessa’s topic was “Bisexu…

I reflect on two examples of people asking for money, one good, one not-so good.By Confidence in Business for Women (in particular)

Dawn has spoken before about her sever mental health issues (e.g., Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder). She works with a psychiatrist, is on medication, and is on permanent disability and unable to work. Today, she shares with an acute stress reaction she recently had and aims to get some perspectiv…

Truth be told, Mandyland is not my main gig. I actually run a company on the side. ;) The Centre for Applied Neuroscience is where I do most of my work as a life coach, life coach trainer, and a neuroscience workshop leader in organizations. I founded the company in 2010 and now have 7-8 people working for me part-time. During this team meeting, we…

Just a little recap of my experience with season two and forecasting what to expect for season 3. In case it interests you, look into the MicroDegree mentioned in this episode: http://www.knowyourbrain.ca/microdegreeBy Mandy Wintink

A year ago Mike was diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma, a cancer of the kidneys. He had surgery 6 months later. His experience was, on paper, great because everything went medically well. But his patient experience made him think very deeply about how to improve the cancer patient experience. Mike is the Design Director at Healthcare Human Factors…

Vanessa, who recently came out as Polyamorous, is questioning whether identifying a sexual orientation is enough to really capture all the nuances of romantic relationships. So we discuss… and that obviously brings up a discussion about gay versus bisexual and gender and labels in general. Resources: Living Apart Together: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/…

Pets: We love them dearly, oftentimes more than the humans in our life. When they leave us it is one of the hardest things to experience. It’s been 2 days since we said goodbye to our amazing dog Jett. It hurts like hell. I miss her dearly. I will love her forever. I want her to come back.By Mandy Wintink

Sarah just got news that one of her tumours (a liver tumour) shrunk! Yay! It appears to be from the radiation she had back in March, which is welcomed news after being a bit confused as to what the initial report meant. She shares this with us today in context with the past 5 days of the perpetual roller coaster she is on. We end with a little life…

Tackling the science of [heterosexual] love is an interesting endeavour indeed. Lauren starts us off with the idea of three phases of love (lust, attraction, and attachment), the hormones and neurotransmitters associated with some of these phases, differences between men and women* and an evolutionary perspective on love. We then spend a good deal …

My friend and colleague, Vanessa, recently came out as polyamorous. She’s been living this philosophy for a long time but I was not privy to it, mostly because she had been keeping her professional life separate from her polyamorous life. But she’s been provoked (by our Cosmic Consultant, Cylla — see Cosmic Consultation episode) to let these two wo…

The morning sounds of Costa Rica is such a great example of the diversity of their ecosystem. It makes me laugh thinking back to when I posted a Birds Chirping Meditation from a park in Toronto. This recording was done while I did a morning yoga practice in the open yoga studio. Now, I do my practice to it while back in Toronto, keeping my eyes clo…

In a (school) year when marijuana became legal, how could we resist the temptation to discuss the neuroscience side of this popular drug. With this change in legislation here in Canada, it granted us the ability to have an open conversation about it, including some of our own personal experiences along with research related to two psychoactive ingr…

Sarah provides a spring update on where she's at with cancer. It’s been a year since her metastatic cancer diagnosis. More scans, treatment protocols, surgeries, emotions, and science.By Sarah

Join me for a sitting meditation. Find your comfortable sitting position, close your eyes, focus on your breath, listen to me talk about impermanence and expectations in the context of anxiety. Then stay for silence together.By Mandy Wintink

In this week’s episode, we explore one of the most crucial aspects of the human experience; memory. We start off with a phenomenon Lauren finds particularly interesting: Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, in which individuals can recall specific, extremely detailed aspects of their daily lives spanning years and even decades in the past. From…

Summary: Humans experience and observe some of the most extravagant wonders and marvelous sights the world has to offer using the sense many of us sometimes take for granted ; Vision! How do eyes work? What role does the brain play in all of it ? Can we trust what we see ? Find out in this week’s episode of the neuroscience podcast. Quite literally…

For the second week of our Conversations with Neuroscience Students series, we discuss Nutrition and the Brain, which is a nice extension from what we talked about last week regarding Exercise and the Brain. There were many places we could have gone with this. What we did get into included the role of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (referred to …

This is a guided meditation practice with a focus on breath awareness. It's one of several basic introductory meditations to help build concentration skills with a focus on the breath.By Mandy Wintink

In this episode, we dive into the world of health and wellness and how exercise affects the brain. We explore concepts such as CBR (cerebral blood flow) and BDNF (brain derived neurotropic factor) to see how these are affected by exercise. We also talk about how exercise can affect different demographics and what significance it holds for illnesses…

I’m going to invite people into the process of my next project related to human intelligence and the need to rethink the way we see intelligence. In this first episode about it, I talk about Multiple Intelligence according to Howard Gardner and also about VIA Character Strengths. At the end, I invite people to take my in-progress screening survey o…

After a few years of students from the second-year neuroscience class I teach at the University of Guelph-Humber asking for how they can learn more neuroscience, I decided to take some of them on as part of their placement requirements. Here we will be exploring various topics in neuroscience. This is our first formal audio meeting where we hear fr…

Sarah JohnsonSat, Jan 19, 1:18 PM (2 days ago)to me In this episode, originally sent as a voice memo to Mandy and Mike, Sarah recounts the immediate aftermath of being kept up overnight by side effects of one of her treatments. This was back in September 2018, before recording the first podcast we published with Sarah on Mandyland. But she wants to…

I’m with Sarah in San Diego, at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting, a place we have been together many times. We had many slow(er than normal) days and quiet nights in our hotel room. And then we got a chance to really dive into what her new normal is. The conference was a perfect place to compare what use to be, with what is now.…

Mike and I got into a conversation about The Interoceptive Mind, a way of feeling our inner body provoked partially by a book that I picked up at the Society for Neuroscience back in November. According to the authors Interoception is “the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal…

Clearly, I have more important things to do with my time than creating episodes. Here’s a little snapshot into that. Note, this was recorded by Mike at the end of our date night, on Dec 1st. I only found out about it yesterday (Dec 9th). Apparently he sent it to me but I didn’t even see it or listen to it. Enjoy. ;P…

An introduction to focusing on the breath, a basic concentration practice that sets a foundation for meditating and for deepening your practice. Mostly instruction and practice, with a little bit of commentary on why we are meditating.By Mandy Wintink

I reconnected with one of my favorite students from Ryerson. He was that super engaged student who asked good critical-thinking questions and really took things to another level. So when he contacted me to say he developed a game on scientific thinking, I was super excited to meet up and learn more about his game. And what he showed met my expectat…

I’m taking a Facebook Sabbatical… and this is why. Resources CBC episode with Jeron Lanier (the internet guy who talks about getting off social media): https://www.cbc.ca/listen/shows/the-current/segment/15610520. Also see: Talk also by Lanier: https://www.ted.com/.../jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to... ZigZag is a podcast about changing the course of c…

An introduction to meditation with some pretty basic instructions with a bit of commentary.By Mandy Wintink

In this monologue, Sarah recounts her feelings over the past 3 years of dealing with cancer both how it looked from the outside and how it felt from the inside. At the beginning, she wondered "how am I going to come out the other side?” It felt like she was walking through a doorway in Alice in Wonderland and then suddenly stumbled upon the strange…

Today... I felt my existential depression... and am so glad I happened upon that term recently. For reference, I was reading from the book A Parent's Guide to Gifted Children, by James Webb, Janet Gore, Edward Amend, and Arlene DeVries.By Mandy Wintink

Ok so Mike learned a whole bunch about the blockchain a while ago when we bought some bitcoin and ethereum and all that fun cryptocurrency stuff. I didn’t. But then I started listening to the Zig Zag podcast and wanted to learn more about it. So… on our next date we find ourselves going down the rabbit hole of trying to figure it out. It got fun fo…

Sarah and I have been talking for a long time about her cancer but this conversation was planned as a way of starting her series of episodes for Mandyland. We had a bunch of ideas planned but realized early that it was hard to figure out where to start. So we started with why she has been hesitant to share this, despite her desire to. That got us t…

At the end of Season One, I put out a call to listeners to send in voice-memo reactions to anything from Season One. Sarah replied and is now a regular guest on Mandyland for Season two! This is her reply.By Sarah

I love Paul’s curiosity about mental health, psychology, and neuroscience. We sat down at the Centre for Social Innovation, which is where we met, on the upstairs patio of the Regent Park location. He is prepping for his new book to be released, which will be a very interactive journey populating the content around the book in curious ways, through…

August 2018 might just be the last of me breastfeeding! This is a big one for me. I’ve been breastfeeding for 3 years and 2 months and I think…. I think… we’re done. Breastfeeding has been amazing and so hard in many ways, as it typically the case for many women. Sometimes it’s the act of doing it that’s hard… sometimes it’s the emotions around it.…

So we’re starting off with a doozy… me and Mike talk about his recent diagnosis of Renal Cell Carcinoma. Yup, that’s what’s been happening over the summer. It started with a few scans for an unrelated reason and a tumour in his left kidney was detected incidentally. Surgery is planned and there is a good prognosis for it being curable. Here we disc…

Welcome back! Just a short little introduction to what you can look forward to this season and why!By Mandy Wintink