#55 Neuropsychology, Illusions & Bending Reality, with Dominique Makowski

Learning Bayesian Statistics

What’s the common point between fiction, fake news, illusions and meditation? They can all be studied with Bayesian statistics, of course!

In this mind-bending episode, Dominique Makowski will for sure expand your horizon. Trained as a clinical neuropsychologist, he is currently working as a postdoc at the Clinical Brain Lab in Singapore, in which he leads the Reality Bending Team. What’s reality-bending you ask? Well, you’ll have to listen to the episode, but I can already tell you we’ll go through a journey in scientific methodology, history of art, religion, and philosophy — what else?

Beyond that, Dominique tries to improve the access to advanced analysis techniques by developing open-source software and tools, like the NeuroKit Python package or the bayestestR package in R.

Even better, he looks a lot like his figures of reference. Like Marcus Aurelius, he plays the piano and guitar. Like Sisyphus, he loves history of art and comparative mythology. And like Yoda, he is a wakeboard master.

Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work at https://bababrinkman.com/ !

Thank you to my Patrons for making this episode possible!

Yusuke Saito, Avi Bryant, Ero Carrera, Brian Huey, Giuliano Cruz, Tim Gasser, James Wade, Tradd Salvo, Adam Bartonicek, William Benton, Alan O'Donnell, Mark Ormsby, Demetri Pananos, James Ahloy, Robin Taylor, Thomas Wiecki, Chad Scherrer, Nathaniel Neitzke, Zwelithini Tunyiswa, Elea McDonnell Feit, Bertrand Wilden, James Thompson, Stephen Oates, Gian Luca Di Tanna, Jack Wells, Matthew Maldonado, Ian Costley, Ally Salim, Larry Gill, Joshua Duncan, Ian Moran, Paul Oreto, Colin Caprani, George Ho, Colin Carroll, Nathaniel Burbank, Michael Osthege, Rémi Louf, Clive Edelsten, Henri Wallen, Hugo Botha, Vinh Nguyen, Raul Maldonado, Marcin Elantkowski, Adam C. Smith, Will Kurt, Andrew Moskowitz, Hector Munoz, Marco Gorelli, Simon Kessell, Bradley Rode, Patrick Kelley, Rick Anderson, Casper de Bruin, Philippe Labonde, Matthew McAnear, Michael Hankin, Cameron Smith, Luis Iberico, Tomáš Frýda, Ryan Wesslen, Andreas Netti, Riley King, Aaron Jones, Daniel Lindroth, Yoshiyuki Hamajima, Sven De Maeyer and Michael DeCrescenzo.

Visit https://www.patreon.com/learnbayesstats to unlock exclusive Bayesian swag ;)

Links from the show:

• To follow:
• Dominique's website: https://dominiquemakowski.github.io/
• Dominique on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Dom_Makowski
• Dominique on GitHub: https://github.com/DominiqueMakowski
• Packages:
• NeuroKit -- Python Toolbox for Neurophysiological Signal Processing: https://github.com/neuropsychology/NeuroKit
• bayestestR -- Become a Bayesian master you will: https://easystats.github.io/bayestestR/
• report -- From R to your manuscript: https://easystats.github.io/report/
• Research:
• The Reality Bending League :https://realitybending.github.io/research/
• What is Reality Bending: https://realitybending.github.io/post/2020-09-28-what_is_realitybending/
• Art:
• NeuropsyXart -- Neuroimaging methods to obtain visual representations of neurophysiological processes: https://dominiquemakowski.github.io/NeuropsyXart/