And he reminds us there’s hope for us all:

“As a student, I remember doing first-year statistics and somewhat struggling with it, until about Week 10 or Week 11, when I finally realised this whole unit is about just one thing… this whole subject is about one concept. Economics is everywhere…. It’s just making the student tuned-in to realise ‘Oh, actually, this is what we teach and this is why you need to learn it.’”

Prashan also talks about the challenges of understanding economics, and the ways he is using lessons from his own experiences as an economics student to spearhead innovative educational strategies to help prepare students for the post-uni world.

Listen to Prashan and browse through our other episodes on Soundcloud or iTunes.

The Three Minute Thesis competition asks PhD students to condense their complex research into three-minute, bite-size summaries that a layperson would understand.

This year’s finalists awed us with a wide range of topics, from ice addiction therapy, to artificial intelligence and transhumanism, to the interplay of colour and emotion.

Breaking down your argument in an essay to make clear, concise points is not an easy task, so have a listen for some essay inspiration!

Listen to the full episode now on iTunes or SoundCloud.

He covers Islamic State’s motivations, the current state of Australia’s border protection, and how the tension in the South China Sea may affect our national security. He also imparts words of wisdom like this: 

“The great majority [of Islamic fundamentalist political, cultural and religious groups] don’t condone violence. They’re instead reacting against the west and western colonisation and westernisation and globalisation by reasserting their own Islamic identity.”

Visit iTunes or Soundcloud to listen to Dr Droogan’s amazing overview of the world as we know it, and to browse the other episodes in our Pioneering Minds podcast.

Dr Rowan Tulloch is well known around campus for his innovative (and AWESOME) approach to teaching, as well as his expertise on video games and digital media. He’s also this week’s podcast guest, and he sat down with us to discuss the stigma and changing nature of gamification, and its effects on education.

“How I like to think about gamification is about understanding that video games and gaming generally have developed a whole kind of heritage… Modern video games in particular teach players to do incredibly complex things – and these are things that the players don’t know, that they’re not familiar with, and so games have to become quite sophisticated teaching systems.”

Times they are a-changin’. You can listen and subscribe to this episode and others via iTunes and Soundcloud.

That’s the question that PhD student Rebecca Gelding explores in her study of music cognition, and she sheds light on this fascinating subject in the latest episode of the Pioneering Minds podcast.

This week’s episode also explores the therapeutic potential of music and, curiously, why imagining the beat of The Bee Gee’s ‘Staying Alive’ could help save someone’s life:

This is the question neuroanthropologist Professor Greg Downey seeks to answer, and he discusses it at length in this week’s Pioneering Minds podcast.

Professor Downey also discusses how culture informs us, the vital importance of research, and the fact that without our amazing brains, we would just be “fairly untalented, hairless apes.” Yep.

You can listen now on iTunes or Soundcloud.

He recently sat down with journalist Adam Norris to talk about the evolution of language and the future of the world as we know it, and he shared gems like this:

“There’s rocks being laid down at this particular point in time that cockroach palaeontologists in 100 million years will be able to point to and go, ‘Look, a level of discarded McDonalds wrappers and plastics and nuclear fallout and oil and oestrogen and caffeine and cocaine… there’s this layer here.'”

Yikes!

You can listen to Prof Gillings full interview on Soundcloud or iTunes, and don’t forget to check back each week to find out about the latest guest.