Berkeley Voices explores the work and lives of fascinating UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars and artists. It aims to educate listeners about Berkeley’s advances in teaching and research, spark curiosity about the deeper layers of American history and to build community across our diverse campus. It's produced and hosted by Anne Brice in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
For the 2024-25 academic year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Berkeley Voices explores the work and lives of fascinating UC Berkeley faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars and artists. It aims to educate listeners about Berkeley’s advances in teaching and research, spark curiosity about the deeper layers of American history and to build community across our diverse campus. It's produced and hosted by Anne Brice in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
For the 2024-25 academic year on Berkeley Voices, we’re exploring the theme of transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes come out on the last Monday of each month, from October through May.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Against her mom’s warnings, UC Berkeley political scientist Marika Landau-Wells watched Arachnaphobia as a kid. Ever since, she has been terrified of spiders. But over the years, she has learned to reason with her quick fear response — No, that spider is not 8 feet in diameter — and calmly trap them and put them outside.
We all encounter problems like this, she says, where we have quick reactions to things we’ve learned to fear. It might be something that is actually dangerous that we really should quickly react to, but it could also be a tiny, non-threatening spider.
Each time, we have to decide what kind of problem it is and then how to respond. She says this task is especially hard today because we're inundated with messages trying to hijack our fear response, from junky online ads to the way politicians speak.
Landau-Wells studies how we make these kinds of decisions, and what influences how we act, especially in situations where there’s a lot on the line.
This is the fourth episode of our eight-part series on transformation. In eight episodes, we’re exploring how transformation — of ideas, of research, of perspective — shows up in the work that happens every day at UC Berkeley. New episodes of the series come out on the last Monday of each month. See all episodes of the series.
Key takeaways:
Listen to the episode and read the transcript on UC Berkeley News (news.berkeley.edu/podcasts).
Image by Sara Oliveira/Unsplash+
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
