Shows
From Our Neurons to YoursWhat ChatGPT understands: Large language models and the neuroscience of meaning | Laura GwilliamsIf you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word. But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human brain, we talked about how similar they are? What if we could use these lar...2025-04-1742 minFrom Our Neurons to YoursHow to live in a world without free will | Robert SapolskyToday, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament." In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control.Before we get into it, it's worth saying that w...2024-12-0540 min
Browser History - Die legendärsten Momente der InternetgeschichteThe Dress: Das Kleid, das die Welt in eine Existenzkrise stürzteIst es blau-schwarz oder gold-weiß? 2015 geht ein Bild von einem Kleid viral, das das Internet in zwei Lager spaltet. Denn: Die einen sehen auf dem Bild ein blau-schwarzes Kleid, die anderen ein gold-weißes. Aber wer hat Recht? Noch mehr heizt die Debatte an, dass keiner eine Erklärung dafür hat, warum Menschen das Bild unterschiedlich wahrnehmen. Auch nicht die Wissenschaft. Bis ein Forscher das nicht mehr auf sich sitzen lassen will.Unsere wichtigsten Quellen:Podcast über die Atombombe der kognitiven Wissenschaften: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2021/02/22/yanss-200-how-a-divisive-photograph-of-a-perceptually-ambiguous-dress-led-two-researchers-to-build-the-nuclear-bomb-of-cognitive-science-out-of-socks-and-crocs/Der origi...2024-11-0433 min
Stanford Psychology Podcast130 - Laura Gwilliams: The Needles that Unraveled the Brain’s Language and What We Can Learn from ThemAnjie chats with Dr. Laura Gwilliams. Laura is an assistant professor at Stanford University, jointly appointed between Stanford Psychology, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science. Her work is focused on understanding the neural representations and operations that give rise to speech comprehension in the human brain. In this episode, Laura introduces her recent paper titled” Large-scale single-neuron speech sound encoding across the depth of human cortex”. She shares the insights we can derive from a recently developed technique called Neuropixels, which is essentially a tiny needle that can be placed into the human brain and record from hundr...2024-04-1140 minFrom Our Neurons to YoursHow we understand each other | Laura GwilliamsWelcome back to our second season of "From Our Neurons to Yours," a podcast where we criss-cross scientific disciplines to take you to the cutting edge of brain science. In this episode, we explore how sound becomes information in the human brain, specifically focusing on how speech is transformed into meaning. Our guest this week is Neuro-linguist Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science based in the Stanford Department of Psychology. In our conversation, she breaks down the intricate steps involved in transforming speech sounds...2023-10-1922 min
The Language Neuroscience Podcast‘Neural dynamics of phoneme sequences reveal position-invariant code for content and order’ with Laura GwilliamsIn this episode, I talk with Laura Gwilliams, soon-to-be Assistant Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Data Science at Stanford University, about her recent paper ‘Neural dynamics of phoneme sequences reveal position-invariant code for content and order’.Gwilliams lab websiteGwilliams L, King JR, Marantz A, Poeppel D. Neural dynamics of phoneme sequences reveal position-invariant code for content and order. Nat Commun 2022; 13: 6606. [doi]2023-05-301h 21