The Secrets Your Brainwaves Can Tell About Your Health
This podcast discusses how, and why, researchers study brainwaves
(Editor's note: This podcast is from The Not Old – Better Show.)
In this episode of The Not Old — Better Show, I interview R. Douglas Fields, an adjunct professor in the neuroscience and cognitive science program at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the author of the new book Electric Brain: How the New Science of Brainwaves Reads Minds, Tells Us How We Learn, and Helps Us Change for the Better.
What is as unique as your fingerprints and more revealing than your diary? Your brainwaves. Analyzing brainwaves has been possible for nearly a century, but neuroscientists are now widening their awareness of the wealth of information brainwaves can hold about who we are — and that information's power. Fields examines the current frontiers of the new brain science and what its research means for medicine, technology and our understanding of ourselves.
Fields explores how information drawn from brainwaves has the potential to reveal hidden signifiers of mental illness and neurological disorders; the role brainwaves can play in improving cognitive performance and health and how they can be used to control devices, from prosthetic limbs to fighter drones. He also looks ahead to the possibilities that future developments in brainwave research may open.
