Isolation: Stories about loneliness

Published: March 24, 2017, 3:44 p.m.

b'Part 1: On an expedition to Antarctica, journalist Alok Jha ends up trapped on the ice for days. Part 2:\\xa0Neuroscientist Rita Tavares attempts to analyze her romantic problems with science. Alok Jha\\xa0is a journalist,\\xa0author and broadcaster, focusing on stories about science. He is the science correspondent at ITV News. Before that, he spent a decade at the Guardian and made programmes for the BBC.\\xa0You can find him on\\xa0Twitter\\xa0and\\xa0Facebook. Rita Tavares\\xa0is a pirate born in the country of Portugal. She crossed the Atlantic ocean to make it to America, where she anchored her ship in New York City after a period in the Pacific waters off of San Francisco. She has a day cover working as a neuroscientist and a poet. In both these activities she keeps a facade of solving the mysteries of the mind scientifically and artfully. In her science job, she discovered that the human brain "sees" our social environment in ways similar to how it encodes physical space. She is now investigating how these processes go awry in patients with psychiatric disorders. In her poetry, she uses her pirate persona to write about her travels and her love of lunatics.\\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices'