Wired to Wander: The Secret Life of Neurons with Spatika Jayaram

What happens in your brain when you make eye contact, read a room, or lose yourself in deep focus? Beneath every social instinct and attentional shift lies an intricate web of neural circuits — ancient, precise, and surprisingly flexible. How do our biases factor into social attention and the social groups we pay attention to, or choose to avoid? In this talk, we'll explore how specific brain regions orchestrate who we pay attention to, how we respond to others, and why these systems sometimes go awry. 

Spatika Jayaram is a Ph.D. student and Gates-Cambridge Scholar in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines mood disorders, and how they develop in the brain during adolescence. She was the runner-up in the international finals of FameLab in 2025, a worldwide science communication event held at CERN in Geneva, after winning the UK Nationals at the Cheltenham Science Festival.