See See by Ceci

About See See by Ceci

See See is a podcast that looks in depth. With each season there is a new theme inquired multidimensionally. Whereas in the realms of science, the intellectual or the spiritual, each episode is a journey of exploration and discovery. See through our guests’ brilliant minds and inspiring life experiences. Their professional and human insight will allow you to see what they see. Embark yourself in an exciting adventure to see through the lenses of an artist, a scholar and researcher, a scientist, a psychologist, a philosopher, an entrepreneur, an activist, a dancer, and an endless list of possibilities that will invite you to see, rethink, relearn and deepen your perspective.

Publisher

Dr. Cecilia Ponce Rivera

Category

education · science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Sept 2023

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

62 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Beyond Diversity: Shadows Upon the Light of the Mind with Andrew Solomon

   An exceptional episode that explores the imperfections and shadows of the human mind, its decay, suffering and redemption, featuring none other than National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award winner, and Pulitzer finalist, Andrew Solomon. This episode takes us on a three-hour journey carried by the hand of Solomon’s captivating, direct and powerful voice, one that leads the mind down its more concealed pathways with empathy and compassion on topics such as violence, identity, depression, suicide, and the discovery of how the stories of others reveal both our own, and the fragility of the narratives we tell ourselves about otherness. A man whose literacy and cultivated background converge with his sensitivity and humane sense of life, in this conversation Solomon generously draws on his own life experiences and on the rich and meticulous research that, more than a study, portrays a courageous and humane immersion into the worlds of others. From Far and Away: How Travel Can Change the World through Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, to his upcoming and keenly awaited book Gone Tomorrow on youth suicide, based on his celebrated New Yorker essays, his work permeates the exchanges, elegantly interwoven with selected passages from Kundera, Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Victoria Woolf and other titans of the world of letters in an episode designed to be savored and experienced to the full. An interview turned into an inward dialogue that poses unwelcome, yet deep and thoughtful, questions about the human experience and the quest for significance in an age of disbelief, with the genuine conviction that there is still hope awaiting in the unchanging antidotes we hold in common: love, and the surrendering to our shared dependence. *Andrew Solomon is a Professor of Clinical Medical Psychology in Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, an Adjunct Clinical Professor of Psychology at Weill Cornell Medical College, a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Yale Medical School, a Distinguished Associate of the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University, and the former President of PEN America.

2. 

   3 Sept 2026

   NDE: Mind Unbound with Eben Alexander

   In this episode of See See by Ceci, we're joined by Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon for over twenty-five years, who shares one of the world's most documented near-death experiences: his own. For decades he operated on the living brain at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Children's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Born into a lineage of neurosurgeons and physicians (his father, himself, and now his eldest son), he was, like most in his field, a materialist: he believed the brain was both the beginning and the end of consciousness. In the autumn of 2008, that belief was undone completely. An aggressive bacterial meningitis (E. coli meningoencephalitis) drove him into a week-long coma, his odds of survival falling to two percent with no chance of recovery. Yet with the neocortex, the seat, neuroscience insists, of all awareness, essentially offline, he experienced not nothingness but a journey of extraordinary vividness and detail. After seven days he woke, and over the following two months made a complete and inexplicable recovery: a case so unprecedented that three physicians outside his care documented it in the peer-reviewed Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In this intimate conversation, he walks us through that journey and the framework he has spent seventeen years building to make sense of it: the brain not as the producer of consciousness but as its filter; consciousness as primary and fundamental to the universe; memory not stored in the brain at all; and a love so vast it holds everyone and everything. Guardian angels, past lives, quantum entanglement, prayer: he asks how such things might be reconciled with science. With reflections from Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Reverend Barbara Holmes, parapsychology researcher Dean Radin, and Jesuit theologian Felix Körner, woven together with excerpts from Dr. Alexander's Proof of Heaven. *He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Medicine, trained and taught as an academic neurosurgeon for more than twenty-five years, including fifteen on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, with appointments at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital, Duke, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Virginia. A specialist in cerebrovascular neurosurgery, he authored more than 150 chapters and papers in peer-reviewed journals and presented at over 230 conferences worldwide. Brief Excerpts from Proof of Heaven read by the author and used in this episode with permission and as courtesy of Dr. Eben Alexander. Sacred Acoustic Tones used in this episode with permission and as a courtesy of Karen Newell.

3. 

   13 Aug 2026

   Minding Global Mental Health: Empowering the (Extra)Ordinary with Vikram Patel

   In this episode of See See by Ceci, we're joined by Vikram Patel, global mental health leader, psychiatrist, and the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He confronts a contradiction at the heart of the twenty-first-century mind: why mental health is declining in the wealthiest nations, with record resources at hand, while some of the most effective solutions are emerging from communities that have almost none. In this wide-ranging conversation, Professor Patel walks us through what he calls the great mental health paradox and its two roots: a reductionist system that answers suffering with a prescription, and an individualism in which "disconnection is like a virus." He traces the asylum and the diagnostic manual; fifty years and tens of billions of dollars that have yielded no biomarker and no new drugs; the loneliness epidemic; the grip of poverty and inequality; and India's rise in youth suicide. Then comes his own answer: the community health worker, most often a woman, most often unpaid, trained to deliver a six-session treatment that cured two-thirds of people with severe depression and kept well years on. With reflections from criminologist Stephen Schoenthaler, neuroscientists Rudolph Tanzi and John Cryan, jazz drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, writer Andrew Solomon, psychiatrist Richard Mollica, philosophers Paul Thagard and Stephen Cave, choreographer Alexander Whitley, sixteen-year-old activist Alexander Schmitz of Young Minds for Global Health, and three-Michelin-starred chef Eric Vildgaard, the episode gathers voices you would rarely find in one room. How minds this different meet on common ground is what we leave for the listening to reveal. This episode is about a scientist fluent in the resources of both the biomedical clinic and the community's own healing knowledge, and about the richness of a simple truth he keeps returning to, that what makes a life well is connection, and who reminds us that when it comes to mental health, we are all developing nations. Above all, this conversation is about the most quietly radical proposition medicine can make: that the cure for much of our suffering is not somewhere out of reach, but near at hand, in the bonds we build between us. *Vikram Patel is the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He co-founded Sangath, the Indian NGO honored with WHO and MacArthur awards, has co-led two Lancet Commissions on global mental health, and is a member of the US National Academy of Medicine. His honors include the Pardes Humanitarian Prize, an Honorary OBE, the Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, and a place on Time's 100 most influential people (2015).

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

YouTube views

7,491

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

67 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 47 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

36

Social presence

0

YouTube

74

Engagement

71

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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