Mythos Media Productions, set up by PhD Psychologist Wilf Nelson, is a media company which hosts the Water Cooler Neuroscience podcast featuring interviews with career neuroscientists and psychologists. Each episode includes a myth about the brain which the guest disproves, a fun story they have about the brain and their personal and professional biography which culminates in discussing their most recent work.
Wilf Nelson's story:
The podcast is primarily a public scientific engagement initiative which aims to teach the public the unintuitive and complex ways the brain works. To do this, Wilf took a different approach. Instead of the usual method for presenting science to the public which focuses on the results and 'so what', he has pushed the methodology and styles of research. He explains that he 'cannot ask people to understand what happened if they can't understand how it happened. It is also unreasonable to expect an audience to understand brain research techniques without being taught them and the podcast does this in an approachable way.
What if there was a podcast where we train you to understand scientists as scientists speak?'
Wilf came up with this idea after discovering an issue. He experienced three years of public engagement with the sciences and was aware of listeners becoming confused about the results of research because they lacked knowledge of the methods. This not only fostered incorrect understandings about results, but left public engagement with professional scientists in an identical state to misinformed campaigns. Both require the speaker to be taken as an authority, not questioning what they say and believing a statement that was far-reaching and impressive. As he attempted to add more explanations of the techniques used, the time given for talks and demonstrations became shorter coincidentally and the problem exacerbated itself. So, Wilf left his previous role as a science communicator and started Mythos Media Productions to create the podcast where he could decide the format and reduce the problem.