Shows
Brain InspiredBI 208 Gabriele Scheler: From Verbal Thought to Neuron ComputationSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Gabriele Scheler co-founded the Carl Correns Foundation for Mathematical Biology. Carl Correns was her great grandfather, one of the early pioneers in genetics. Gabriele is a computational neuroscientist, whose goal is to build models of cellular computation, and much of her focus is on neurons.
We discuss her theoretical work building a new kind of single neuron model. She, like Dmitri Chklovskii a few episodes ago, believes we've been stuck with essentially the same family of models for a neuron for a...2025-03-261h 35
Brain InspiredBI 207 Alison Preston: Schemas in our Brains and MindsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released.
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
The concept o...2025-03-121h 29
Brain InspiredQuick Announcement: Complexity GroupHere's the link to learn more and sign up:
Complexity Group Email List.2025-03-0506 min
Brain InspiredBI 206 Ciara Greene: Memories Are Useful, Not AccurateSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Ciara Greene is Associate Professor in the University College Dublin School of Psychology. In this episode we discuss Ciara's book Memory Lane: The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember, co-authored by her colleague Gillian Murphy. The book is all about how human episodic memory works and why it works the way it does. Contrary to our common assumption, a "good memory" isn't necessarily highly accurate - we don't store memories like files in a filing cabinet. Instead our memories evolved to help us function i...2025-02-261h 29
Brain InspiredBI 205 Dmitri Chklovskii: Neurons Are Smarter Than You ThinkSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released:
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Since the 1940s...2025-02-121h 39
Brain InspiredBI 204 David Robbe: Your Brain Doesn’t Measure TimeSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released:
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
When you play...2025-01-291h 37
Brain InspiredBI 203 David Krakauer: How To Think Like a Complexity ScientistSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released.
David Krakauer is the president of the Santa Fe Institute, where their mission is offici...2025-01-141h 46
Brain InspiredBI 202 Eli Sennesh: Divide-and-Conquer to PredictSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
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Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.
Eli Sennesh is a postdoc at Vanderbilt University, one of my old stomping groun...2025-01-031h 38
Brain InspiredBI 201 Rajesh Rao: From Predictive Coding to Brain Co-ProcessorsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Today I'm in conversation with Rajesh Rao, a distinguished professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, where he also co-directs the Center for Neurotechnology. Back in 1999, Raj and Dana Ballard published what became quite a famous paper, which proposed how predictive coding might be implemented in brains. What is predictive coding, you may be wondering? It's roughly the idea that your brain is constantly predicting incoming sensory signals, and it generates that prediction as a top-down signal that meets t...2024-12-181h 37
Love & Philosophy#42: Socrates of Neuroscience: Academic dissonance, unexpected paths & process with Paul MiddlebrooksSend a love messageNeuroscience, AI, and Philosophy with Paul from Brain InspiredCan we think about education (and age) differently? Was it worth it to give up academia, move into an RV and create a podcast?Can we think differently about computation and representation?Paul Middlebrooks is no gadfly but as you'll hear, the one thing he knows is that he does not know (as Plato quotes Socrates: "All I know is that I know nothing.") He quit academia and started a podcast and has since become an important voice to many...2024-12-111h 27
Brain InspiredBI 200 Grace Hwang and Joe Monaco: The Future of NeuroAISupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Joe Monaco and Grace Hwang co-organized a recent workshop I participated in, the 2024 BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop. You may have heard of the BRAIN Initiative, but in case not, BRAIN is is huge funding effort across many agencies, one of which is the National Institutes of Health, where this recent workshop was held. The BRAIN Initiative began in 2013 under the Obama administration, with the goal to support developing technologies to help understand the human brain, so we can cure brain based diseases.
BR...2024-12-041h 37
Brain InspiredBI 199 Hessam Akhlaghpour: Natural Universal ComputationSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
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Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: https://www.thetransmitter.org/newsletters/
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransm...2024-11-261h 49
Brain InspiredBI 198 Tony Zador: Neuroscience Principles to Improve AISupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: https://www.thetransmitter.org/newsletters/
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransm...2024-11-111h 35
Brain InspiredBI 197 Karen Adolph: How Babies Learn to Move and ThinkSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released.
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Karen Adolph ru...2024-10-251h 29
Theoretical Neuroscience PodcastOn neuro-AI on the boat - part 2 of 2 - with Cristina Savin, Tim Vogels, Mikkel Lepperød, Paul Middlebrooks - #20In September Paul Middlebrooks, the producer of the podcast BrainInspired, and I were both on a neuro-AI workshop on a coast liner cruising the Norwegian fjords. We decided to make two joint podcasts with some of the participants where we discuss the role of AI in neuroscience. In this second part we discuss the topic with Cristina Savin and Tim Vogels and round off with a brief discussion with Mikkel Lepperød, the main organizer of the workshop, about what he learned from the workshop. 2024-10-111h 21
Brain InspiredBI 196 Cristina Savin and Tim Vogels with Gaute Einevoll and Mikkel LepperødSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
This is the second conversation I had while teamed up with Gaute Einevoll at a workshop on NeuroAI in Norway. In this episode, Gaute and I are joined by Cristina Savin and Tim Vogels. Cristina shares how her lab uses recurrent neural ne...2024-10-111h 19Theoretical Neuroscience PodcastOn neuro-AI on the boat - part 1 of 2 - with Ken Harris, Andreas Tolias, Mikkel Lepperød, Paul Middlebrooks - #19In September Paul Middlebrooks, the producer of the podcast BrainInspired, and I were both on a neuro-AI workshop on a coast liner cruising the Norwegian fjords. We decided to make two joint podcasts with some of the participants where we discuss the role of AI in neuroscience. In this first part we talk with Mikkel Lepperod, the main organizer about the goal of the workshop, and with Ken Harris and Andreas Tolias about how AI has affected their research neuroscientists and their thoughts about the future of neuro-AI.2024-10-081h 19
Brain InspiredBI 195 Ken Harris and Andreas Tolias with Gaute Einevoll and Mikkel LepperødSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
This is the first of two less usual episodes. I was recently in Norway at a NeuroAI workshop called Validating models: How would success in NeuroAI look like? What follows are a few recordings I made with my friend Gaute Einevoll. Gaute h...2024-10-081h 17
Brain InspiredBI 194 Vijay Namboodiri & Ali Mohebi: Dopamine Keeps Getting More InterestingSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
https://youtu.be/lbKEOdbeqHo
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
The Transmitter has provided a transcript for this episode.
Vijay Namoodiri runs the Nam Lab at the University of California San Francisco, and Ali Mojebi is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ali as be...2024-09-271h 37
Brain InspiredBI 193 Kim Stachenfeld: Enhancing Neuroscience and AISupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership.
Check out this story: Monkeys build mental maps to navigate new tasks
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To explore...2024-09-111h 32
Brain InspiredBI 192 Àlex Gómez-Marín: The Edges of ConsciousnessSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Àlex Gómez-Marín heads The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain. He's one of those theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist, and he has studied a wide range of topics over his career. Most recently, he has become interested in what he calls the "edges of consciousness", which encompasses the many trying to explain what may be happening when we have experiences outside our normal everyday experiences. For example, when we are under the influence of hallucinogens, when have...2024-08-291h 30
Brain InspiredBI 191 Damian Kelty-Stephen: Fractal Turbulent Cascading IntelligenceSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Damian Kelty-Stephen is an experimental psychologist at State University of New York at New Paltz. Last episode with Luis Favela, we discussed many of the ideas from ecological psychology, and how Louie is trying to reconcile those principles with those of neuroscience. In this episode, Damian and I in some ways continue that discussion, because Damian is also interested in unifying principles of ecological psychology and neuroscience. However, he is approaching it from a different perspective that Louie. What drew me originally to D...2024-08-151h 27
Brain InspiredBI 190 Luis Favela: The Ecological BrainSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Luis Favela is an Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. He is part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part many things, and on this episode we discuss his new book, The Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment.
In the book, Louie presents his NeuroEcological Nexus Theory, or NExT, which, as the subtitle says, proposes a way forward to tie together our brains, our bodies, and the environment; namely it has a lot to do with the complexity sciences a...2024-07-311h 41
Brain InspiredBI 189 Joshua Vogelstein: Connectomes and Prospective LearningSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Jovo, as you'll learn, is theoretically oriented, and enjoys the formalism of mathematics to approach questions that begin with a sense of wonder. So after I learn more about his overall approach, the first topic we discuss is the world's currently largest map of an entire brain... the connectome of an insect, the fruit fly. We talk about his role in this collaborative effort, what the heck a connectome is, why it's useful and what to do with it, and so on.
2024-06-291h 27
Brain InspiredBI 188 Jolande Fooken: Coordinating Action and PerceptionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Jolande Fooken is a post-postdoctoral researcher interested in how we move our eyes and move our hands together to accomplish naturalistic tasks. Hand-eye coordination is one of those things that sounds simple and we do it all the time to make meals for our children day in, and day out, and day in, and day out. But it becomes way less seemingly simple as soon as you learn how we make various kinds of eye movements, and how we make various kinds of h...2024-05-271h 28
Brain InspiredBI 187: COSYNE 2024 Neuro-AI PanelSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Recently I was invited to moderate a panel at the annual Computational and Systems Neuroscience, or COSYNE, conference. This year was the 20th anniversary of COSYNE, and we were in Lisbon Porturgal. The panel goal was to discuss the relationship between neuroscience and AI. The panelists were Tony Zador, Alex Pouget, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Kim Stachenfeld, Jonathan Pillow, and Eva Dyer. And I'll let them introduce themselves soon. Two of the panelists, Tony and Alex, co-founded COSYNE those 20 years ago, and they c...2024-04-201h 03
Brain InspiredBI 186 Mazviita Chirimuuta: The Brain AbstractedSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Mazviita Chirimuuta is a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. Today we discuss topics from her new book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience.
She largely argues that when we try to understand something complex, like the brain, using models, and math, and analogies, for example - we should keep in mind these are all ways of simplifying and abstracting away details to give us something we actually can understand. And, when we do science, every t...2024-03-251h 43
Brain InspiredBI 185 Eric Yttri: Orchestrating BehaviorSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
As some of you know, I recently got back into the research world, and in particular I work in Eric Yttris' lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
Eric's lab studies the relationship between various kinds of behaviors and the neural activity in a few areas known to be involved in enacting and shaping those behaviors, namely the motor cortex and basal ganglia. And study that, he uses tools like optogentics, neuronal recordings, and stimulations, while mice perform certain tasks, or, in my ca...2024-03-061h 44
Brain InspiredBI 184 Peter Stratton: Synthesize Neural PrinciplesSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Peter Stratton is a research scientist at Queensland University of Technology.
I was pointed toward Pete by a patreon supporter, who sent me a sort of perspective piece Pete wrote that is the main focus of our conversation, although we also talk about some of his work in particular - for example, he works with spiking neural networks, like my last guest, Dan Goodman.
What Pete argues for is what he calls a sideways-in approach. So a bottom-up approach i...2024-02-201h 30
Brain InspiredBI 183 Dan Goodman: Neural ReckoningSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
You may know my guest as the co-founder of Neuromatch, the excellent online computational neuroscience academy, or as the creator of the Brian spiking neural network simulator, which is freely available. I know him as a spiking neural network practitioner extraordinaire. Dan Goodman runs the Neural Reckoning Group at Imperial College London, where they use spiking neural networks to figure out how biological and artificial brains reckon, or compute.
All of the current AI we use to do all the impressive t...2024-02-071h 28
Brain InspiredBI 182: John Krakauer Returns… AgainSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
John Krakauer has been on the podcast multiple times (see links below). Today we discuss some topics framed around what he's been working on and thinking about lately. Things like
Whether brains actually reorganize after damage
The role of brain plasticity in general
The path toward and the path not toward understanding higher cognition
How to fix motor problems after strokes
AGI
Functionalism, consciousness, and much more.
2024-01-191h 25
Brain InspiredBI 181 Max Bennett: A Brief History of IntelligenceSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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By day, Max Bennett is an entrepreneur. He has cofounded and CEO'd multiple AI and technology companies. By many other countless hours, he has studied brain related sciences. Those long hours of research have payed off in the form of this book, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains.
Three lines of research formed the basis for how M...2023-12-251h 27
Brain InspiredBI 180 Panel Discussion: Long-term Memory Encoding and Connectome DecodingSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Welcome to another special panel discussion episode.
I was recently invited to moderate at discussion amongst 6 people at the annual Aspirational Neuroscience meetup. Aspirational Neuroscience is a nonprofit community run by Kenneth Hayworth. Ken has been on the podcast before on episode 103. Ken helps me introduce the meetup and panel discussion for a few minutes. The goal in general was to discuss how current and developing neuroscience technologies might be used to decode a nontrivial memory from a static connectome - w...2023-12-111h 29
Brain InspiredBI 179 Laura Gradowski: Include the Fringe with PluralismSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Laura Gradowski is a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh. Pluralism is roughly the idea that there is no unified account of any scientific field, that we should be tolerant of and welcome a variety of theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and methods, and goals, when doing science. Pluralism is kind of a buzz word right now in my little neuroscience world, but it's an old and w...2023-11-271h 39
Brain InspiredBI 178 Eric Shea-Brown: Neural Dynamics and DimensionsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Eric Shea-Brown is a theoretical neuroscientist and principle investigator of the working group on neural dynamics at the University of Washington. In this episode, we talk a lot about dynamics and dimensionality in neural networks... how to think about them, why they matter, how Eric's perspectives have changed through his career. We discuss a handful of his specific research findings about dynamics and dimensionality, like how dimensionality changes w...2023-11-131h 35
Brain InspiredBI 177 Special: Bernstein Workshop PanelSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
I was recently invited to moderate a panel at the Annual Bernstein conference - this one was in Berlin Germany. The panel I moderated was at a satellite workshop at the conference called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? Below are the panelists. I hope you enjoy the discussion!
Program: How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience?
Panelists:
Katrin Franke
Lab website.
Twitter: @kfrankelab.
Ralf Haefner
Haefner lab.
Twitter: @h...2023-10-301h 13
Brain InspiredBI 176 David Poeppel ReturnsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
David runs his lab at NYU, where they stud`y auditory cognition, speech perception, language, and music. On the heels of the episode with David Glanzman, we discuss the ongoing mystery regarding how memory works, how to study and think about brains and minds, and the reemergence (perhaps) of the language of thought hypothesis.
David has been on the podcast a few times... once by himself, and again with Gyorgy Buzsaki.
Poeppel lab
Twitter: @davidpoeppel.
Related papers
We don’t know...2023-10-141h 23
Brain Space Time Podcast#4 Paul Middlebrooks: BrainInspired & PodcastingAn episode with my favourite podcast host, Paul Middlebrooks. Paul and I met in Berlin, and talked about his journey away from (and back into) academia and why he started his podcast BrainInspired. Yes, there is a lot of podcast meta-talk in this episode. For example, how science podcasts give you a glimpse into another field (as an outsider) and some advice for fellow podcast hosts. We also get into productivity, self-learning and some big-picture questions on what's holding neuroscience back.
For Apple Podcast users, find books/papers links at: https://akseliilmanen.wixsite.com/akseli-ilmanen/post/pod04
2023-10-0347 min
Brain InspiredBI 175 Kevin Mitchell: Free AgentsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Kevin Mitchell is professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. He's been on the podcast before, and we talked a little about his previous book, Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. He's back today to discuss his new book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. The book is written very well and guides the reader through a wide range of scientific kno...2023-10-031h 46
Brain InspiredBI 174 Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes EverythingCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher and has been interested in complexity since before it was cool.
In this episode, we discuss many of the topics and ideas in her new book, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence, which makes the thorough case that constraints should be given way more attention when trying to understand complex systems like brains and minds - how they're organized, how t...2023-09-131h 45
Brain InspiredBI 173 Justin Wood: Origins of Visual IntelligenceSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
In the intro, I mention the Bernstein conference workshop I'll participate in, called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience?. Follow that link to learn more, and register for the conference here. Hope to see you there in late September in Berlin!
Justin Wood runs the Wood Lab at Indiana University, and his lab's tagline is "building newborn minds in virtual worlds." In this episode, we discuss his work comparing the visual cognition of newborn c...2023-08-301h 35
Brain InspiredBI 172 David Glanzman: Memory All The Way DownSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
David runs his lab at UCLA where he's also a distinguished professor. David used to believe what is currently the mainstream view, that our memories are stored in our synapses, those connections between our neurons. So as we learn, the synaptic connections strengthen and weaken until their just right, and that serves to preserve the memory. That's been the dominant view in neuroscience for decades, and is the fundamental principle that underlies basically all of deep learning in AI. But because of his own...2023-08-071h 30
Brain InspiredBI 171 Mike Frank: Early Language and CognitionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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My guest is Michael C. Frank, better known as Mike Frank, who runs the Language and Cognition lab at Stanford. Mike's main interests center on how children learn language - in particular he focuses a lot on early word learning, and what that tells us about our other cognitive functions, like concept formation and social cognition.
We discuss that, his love for developing open data sets t...2023-07-221h 24
Brain InspiredBI 170 Ali Mohebi: Starting a Research LabSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
In this episode I have a casual chat with Ali Mohebi about his new faculty position and his plans for the future.
Ali's website.
Twitter: @mohebial
2023-07-111h 17
Brain InspiredBI 169 Andrea Martin: Neural Dynamics and LanguageSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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My guest today is Andrea Martin, who is the Research Group Leader in the department of Language and Computation in Neural Systems at the Max Plank Institute and the Donders Institute. Andrea is deeply interested in understanding how our biological brains process and represent language. To this end, she is developing a theoretical model of language. The aim of the model is to account for the properties of l...2023-06-281h 41
Brain InspiredBI 168 Frauke Sandig and Eric Black w Alex Gomez-Marin: AWARE: Glimpses of ConsciousnessCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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This is one in a periodic series of episodes with Alex Gomez-Marin, exploring how the arts and humanities can impact (neuro)science. Artistic creations, like cinema, have the ability to momentarily lower our ever-critical scientific mindset and allow us to imagine alternate possibilities and experience emotions outside our normal scientific routines. Might this feature of art potentially change our scientific attitudes and perspectives?
Frauke Sandig and E...2023-06-021h 54
Brain InspiredBI 167 Panayiota Poirazi: AI Brains Need DendritesSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Panayiota Poirazi runs the Poirazi Lab at the FORTH Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and Yiota loves dendrites, those branching tree-like structures sticking out of all your neurons, and she thinks you should love dendrites, too, whether you study biological or artificial intelligence. In neuroscience, the old story was that dendrites just reach out and collect incoming signals for the all-important neuron cell body to process. Yiota, a...2023-05-271h 27
Brain InspiredBI 166 Nick Enfield: Language vs. RealitySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Nick Enfield is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney. In this episode we discuss topics in his most recent book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists. A central question in the book is what is language for? What's the function of language. You might be familiar with the debate about whether language evolved for each of us thinking o...2023-05-091h 27
Brain InspiredBI 165 Jeffrey Bowers: Psychology Gets No RespectCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Jeffrey Bowers is a psychologist and professor at the University of Bristol. As you know, many of my previous guests are in the business of comparing brain activity to the activity of units in artificial neural network models, when humans or animals and the models are performing the same tasks. And a big story that has emerged over the past decade or so is that there's a remarkable s...2023-04-121h 38
Brain InspiredBI 164 Gary Lupyan: How Language Affects ThoughtSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Gary Lupyan runs the Lupyan Lab at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studies how language and cognition are related. In some ways, this is a continuation of the conversation I had last episode with Ellie Pavlick, in that we partly continue to discuss large language models. But Gary is more focused on how language, and naming things, categorizing things, changes our cognition related those things. How does na...2023-04-011h 31
Brain InspiredBI 163 Ellie Pavlick: The Mind of a Language ModelSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Ellie Pavlick runs her Language Understanding and Representation Lab at Brown University, where she studies lots of topics related to language. In AI, large language models, sometimes called foundation models, are all the rage these days, with their ability to generate convincing language, although they still make plenty of mistakes. One of the things Ellie is interested in is how these models work, what kinds of representations are b...2023-03-201h 21
Brain InspiredBI 162 Earl K. Miller: Thoughts are an Emergent PropertySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Earl Miller runs the Miller Lab at MIT, where he studies how our brains carry out our executive functions, like working memory, attention, and decision-making. In particular he is interested in the role of the prefrontal cortex and how it coordinates with other brain areas to carry out these functions. During this episode, we talk broadly about how neuroscience has changed during Earl's career, and how his own t...2023-03-081h 23
Brain InspiredBI 161 Hugo Spiers: Navigation and Spatial CognitionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Hugo Spiers runs the Spiers Lab at University College London. In general Hugo is interested in understanding spatial cognition, like navigation, in relation to other processes like planning and goal-related behavior, and how brain areas like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex coordinate these cognitive functions. So, in this episode, we discuss a range of his research and thoughts around those topics. You may have heard about the studies h...2023-02-241h 34
Brain InspiredBI 160 Ole Jensen: Rhythms of CognitionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Ole Jensen is co-director of the Centre for Human Brain Health at University of Birmingham, where he runs his Neuronal Oscillations Group lab. Ole is interested in how the oscillations in our brains affect our cognition by helping to shape the spiking patterns of neurons, and by helping to allocate resources to parts of our brains that are relevant for whatever ongoing behaviors we're performing in different contexts. P...2023-02-071h 28
Brain InspiredBI 159 Chris Summerfield: Natural General IntelligenceSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Chris Summerfield runs the Human Information Processing Lab at University of Oxford, and he's a research scientist at Deepmind. You may remember him from episode 95 with Sam Gershman, when we discussed ideas around the usefulness of neuroscience and psychology for AI. Since then, Chris has released his book, Natural General Intelligence: How understanding the brain can help us build AI. In the book, Chris makes the case that i...2023-01-271h 28
Brain InspiredBI 158 Paul Rosenbloom: Cognitive ArchitecturesCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Paul Rosenbloom is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. In the early 1980s, Paul , along with John Laird and the early AI pioneer Alan Newell, developed one the earliest and best know cognitive architectures called SOAR. A cognitive architecture, as Paul defines it, is a model of the fixed structures and processes underlying minds, and in Paul's case the human mind. And SOAR w...2023-01-161h 35
Brain InspiredBI 157 Sarah Robins: Philosophy of MemorySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Sarah Robins is a philosopher at the University of Kansas, one a growing handful of philosophers specializing in memory. Much of her work focuses on memory traces, which is roughly the idea that somehow our memories leave a trace in our minds. We discuss memory traces themselves and how they relate to the engram (see BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?, and BI 127 Tomás Ryan: Memory, In...2023-01-021h 20
Brain InspiredBI 156 Mariam Aly: Memory, Attention, and PerceptionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Mariam Aly runs the Aly lab at Columbia University, where she studies the interaction of memory, attention, and perception in brain regions like the hippocampus. The short story is that memory affects our perceptions, attention affects our memories, memories affect our attention, and these effects have signatures in neural activity measurements in our hippocampus and other brain areas. We discuss her experiments testing the nature of those interactions. W...2022-12-231h 40
Brain InspiredBI 155 Luiz Pessoa: The Entangled BrainSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Luiz Pessoa runs his Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he studies how emotion and cognition interact. On this episode, we discuss many of the topics from his latest book, The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together, which is aimed at a general audience. The book argues we need to re-think how to study the brain. Traditionally, c...2022-12-101h 54
Brain InspiredBI 154 Anne Collins: Learning with Working MemoryCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Anne Collins runs her Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Berkley One of the things she's been working on for years is how our working memory plays a role in learning as well, and specifically how working memory and reinforcement learning interact to affect how we learn, depending on the nature of what we're trying to learn. We discuss that interaction specifically. We also discuss mo...2022-11-291h 22
Brain InspiredBI 153 Carolyn Dicey-Jennings: Attention and the SelfCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Carolyn Dicey Jennings is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist at University of California, Merced. In her book The Attending Mind, she lays out an attempt to unify the concept of attention. Carolyn defines attention roughly as the mental prioritization of some stuff over other stuff based on our collective interests. And one of her main claims is that attention is evidence of a real, emergent self or s...2022-11-181h 25
Brain InspiredBI 152 Michael L. Anderson: After Phrenology: Neural ReuseCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Michael L. Anderson is a professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at Western University. His book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain, calls for a re-conceptualization of how we understand and study brains and minds. Neural reuse is the phenomenon that any given brain area is active for multiple cognitive functions, and partners with different sets of brain areas to carry out different cognitive functions. W...2022-11-081h 45
Brain InspiredBI 151 Steve Byrnes: Brain-like AGI SafetySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Steve Byrnes is a physicist turned AGI safety researcher. He's concerned that when we create AGI, whenever and however that might happen, we run the risk of creating it in a less than perfectly safe way. AGI safety (AGI not doing something bad) is a wide net that encompasses AGI alignment (AGI doing what we want it to do). We discuss a host of ideas Steve writes about in his Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety blog series, which uses what he has learned about b...2022-10-301h 31
Brain InspiredNeuro-AI Course Special Offer (quick announcement)Click here to learn more about the course2022-10-2502 min
Brain InspiredBI 150 Dan Nicholson: Machines, Organisms, ProcessesSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Dan Nicholson is a philosopher at George Mason University. He incorporates the history of science and philosophy into modern analyses of our conceptions of processes related to life and organisms. He is also interested in re-orienting our conception of the universe as made fundamentally of things/substances, and replacing it with the idea the universe is made fundamentally of processes (process philosophy). In this episode, we both of t...2022-10-151h 38
Brain InspiredBI 149 William B. Miller: Cell IntelligenceCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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William B. Miller is an ex-physician turned evolutionary biologist. In this episode, we discuss topics related to his new book, Bioverse: How the Cellular World Contains the Secrets to Life's Biggest Questions. The premise of the book is that all individual cells are intelligent in their own right, and possess a sense of self. From this, Bill makes the case that cells cooperate with other cells to engineer w...2022-10-051h 33
Brain InspiredBI 148 Gaute Einevoll: Brain SimulationsCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Gaute Einevoll is a professor at the University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Use develops detailed models of brain networks to use as simulations, so neuroscientists can test their various theories and hypotheses about how networks implement various functions. Thus, the models are tools. The goal is to create models that are multi-level, to test questions at various levels of biological detail; and multi-modal, to p...2022-09-251h 28
Brain InspiredBI 147 Noah Hutton: In SilicoCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Noah Hutton writes, directs, and scores documentary and narrative films. On this episode, we discuss his documentary In Silico. In 2009, Noah watched a TED talk by Henry Markram, in which Henry claimed it would take 10 years to fully simulate a human brain. This claim inspired Noah to chronicle the project, visiting Henry and his team periodically throughout. The result was In Silico, which tells the science, human, and s...2022-09-131h 37
Brain InspiredBI 146 Lauren Ross: Causal and Non-Causal ExplanationCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Lauren Ross is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She studies and writes about causal and non-causal explanations in philosophy of science, including distinctions among causal structures. Throughout her work, Lauren employs Jame's Woodward's interventionist approach to causation, which Jim and I discussed in episode 145. In this episode, we discuss Jim's lasting impact on the philosophy of causation, the current dominance of mechanistic explanation and i...2022-09-071h 22
Brain InspiredBI 145 James Woodward: Causation with a Human FaceCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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James Woodward is a recently retired Professor from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Jim has tremendously influenced the field of causal explanation in the philosophy of science. His account of causation centers around intervention - intervening on a cause should alter its effect. From this minimal notion, Jim has described many facets and varieties of causal structures. In this episode, w...2022-08-281h 25
Brain InspiredBI 144 Emily M. Bender and Ev Fedorenko: Large Language ModelsCheck out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience.
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Large language models, often now called "foundation models", are the model de jour in AI, based on the transformer architecture. In this episode, I bring together Evelina Fedorenko and Emily M. Bender to discuss how language models stack up to our own language processing and generation (models and brains both excel at next-word prediction), whether language evolved in humans for complex thoughts or for communication (communication, says Ev), w...2022-08-171h 11
Brain InspiredBI 143 Rodolphe Sepulchre: Mixed Feedback ControlCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Rodolphe Sepulchre is a control engineer and theorist at Cambridge University. He focuses on applying feedback control engineering principles to build circuits that model neurons and neuronal circuits. We discuss his work on mixed feedback control - positive and negative - as an underlying principle of the mixed digital and analog brain signals,, the role of neuromodulation as a controller, applying these principles to Eve Marder's lobster/crab n...2022-08-061h 24
Brain InspiredBI 142 Cameron Buckner: The New DoGMACheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Cameron Buckner is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at The University of Houston. He is writing a book about the age-old philosophical debate on how much of our knowledge is innate (nature, rationalism) versus how much is learned (nurture, empiricism). In the book and his other works, Cameron argues that modern AI can help settle the debate. In particular, he suggests we focus on what types of psychological "d...2022-07-261h 43
Brain InspiredBI 141 Carina Curto: From Structure to DynamicsCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Carina Curto is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University. She uses her background skills in mathematical physics/string theory to study networks of neurons. On this episode, we discuss the world of topology in neuroscience - the study of the geometrical structures mapped out by active populations of neurons. We also discuss her work on "combinatorial linear threshold networks" (CLTNs). Unlike the l...2022-07-121h 31
Brain InspiredBI 140 Jeff Schall: Decisions and Eye MovementsCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Jeff Schall is the director of the Center for Visual Neurophysiology at York University, where he runs the Schall Lab. His research centers around studying the mechanisms of our decisions, choices, movement control, and attention within the saccadic eye movement brain systems and in mathematical psychology models- in other words, how we decide where and when to look. Jeff was my postdoctoral advisor at Vanderbilt University, and I w...2022-07-011h 20
Brain InspiredBI 139 Marc Howard: Compressed Time and MemoryCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Marc Howard runs his Theoretical Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Boston University, where he develops mathematical models of cognition, constrained by psychological and neural data. In this episode, we discuss the idea that a Laplace transform and its inverse may serve as a unified framework for memory. In short, our memories are compressed on a continuous log-scale: as memories get older, their representations "spread out" in time. It turns o...2022-06-201h 20
Brain InspiredBI 138 Matthew Larkum: The Dendrite HypothesisCheck out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Matthew Larkum runs his lab at Humboldt University of Berlin, where his group studies how dendrites contribute to computations within and across layers of the neocortex. Since the late 1990s, Matthew has continued to uncover key properties of the way pyramidal neurons stretch across layers of the cortex, their dendrites receiving inputs from those different layers - and thus different brain areas. For example, layer 5 pyramidal neurons have a...2022-06-061h 51
Brain InspiredBI 137 Brian Butterworth: Can Fish Count?Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience
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Brian Butterworth is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at University College London. In his book, Can Fish Count?: What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds, he describes the counting and numerical abilities across many different species, suggesting our ability to count is evolutionarily very old (since many diverse species can count). We discuss many of the examples in his book, the mathematical disability dyscalculia and its relation t...2022-05-271h 17
Brain InspiredBI 136 Michel Bitbol and Alex Gomez-Marin: PhenomenologySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Michel Bitbol is Director of Research at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Alex Gomez-Marin is a neuroscientist running his lab, The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante. We discuss phenomenology as an alternative perspective on our scientific endeavors. Although we like to believe our science is objective and explains the reality of the world we inhabit, we can't escape the fact t...2022-05-171h 34
Brain InspiredBI 135 Elena Galea: The Stars of the BrainSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Brains are often conceived as consisting of neurons and "everything else." As Elena discusses, the "everything else," including glial cells and in particular astrocytes, have largely been ignored in neuroscience. That's partly because the fast action potentials of neurons have been assumed to underlie computations in the brain, and because technology only recently afforded closer scrutiny of astrocyte activity. Now that we can record calcium signaling in astrocytes, i...2022-05-071h 17
Brain InspiredBI 134 Mandyam Srinivasan: Bee Flight and CognitionSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Srini is Emeritus Professor at Queensland Brain Institute in Australia. In this episode, he shares his wide range of behavioral experiments elucidating the principles of flight and navigation in insects. We discuss how bees use optic flow signals to determine their speed, distance, proximity to objects, and to gracefully land. These abilities are largely governed via control systems, balancing incoming perceptual signals with internal reference signals. We also t...2022-04-271h 26
Brain InspiredBI 133 Ken Paller: Lucid Dreaming, Memory, and SleepSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
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Ken discusses the recent work in his lab that allows communication with subjects while they experience lucid dreams. This new paradigm opens many avenues to study the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, sleep, dreams, memory, and learning, and to improve and optimize sleep for cognition. Ken and his team are developing a Lucid Dreaming App which is freely available via his lab. We also discuss much of his w...2022-04-151h 29
Brain InspiredBI 132 Ila Fiete: A Grid Scaffold for MemoryAnnouncement:
I'm releasing my Neuro-AI course April 10-13, after which it will be closed for some time. Learn more here.
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Ila discusses her theoretical neuroscience work suggesting how our memories are formed within the cognitive maps we use to navigate the world and navigate our thoughts. The main idea is that grid cell networks in the entorhinal cortex internally generate a structured scaffold, which gets sent to the hippocampus. Neurons in the hippocampus, like the well-known place cells, receive t...2022-04-031h 17
Brain InspiredBI 131 Sri Ramaswamy and Jie Mei: Neuromodulation-aware DNNsSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Sri and Mei join me to discuss how including principles of neuromodulation in deep learning networks may improve network performance. It's an ever-present question how much detail to include in models, and we are in the early stages of learning how neuromodulators and their interactions shape biological brain function. But as we continue to learn more, Sri and Mei are interested in building "neuromodulation-aware DNNs".
Neural Circuits Laboratory.Twitter: Sri: @srikipedia; Jie: @neuro_Mei.Related papersInforming deep neural networks by multiscale principles of...2022-03-261h 26
Brain InspiredBI 130 Eve Marder: Modulation of Networks
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Eve discusses many of the lessons she has learned studying a small nervous system, the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system (STG). The STG has only about 30 neurons and its connections and neurophysiology are well-understood. Yet Eve's work has shown it functions under a remarkable diversity of conditions, and does so is a remarkable variety of ways. We discuss her work on the STG specifically, and what her work implies about trying to study much larger nervous systems, like our human brains.
The Marder L...2022-03-131h 00
Brain InspiredBI 129 Patryk Laurent: Learning from the Real WorldSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Patryk and I discuss his wide-ranging background working in both the neuroscience and AI worlds, and his resultant perspective on what's needed to move forward in AI, including some principles of brain processes that are more and less important. We also discuss his own work using some of those principles to help deep learning generalize to better capture how humans behave in and perceive the world.
Patryk's homepage.Twitter: @paklnet.Related papersUnsupervised Learning from Continuous Video in a Scalable Predictive Recurrent Network.
...2022-03-021h 21
Brain InspiredBI 128 Hakwan Lau: In Consciousness We TrustSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Hakwan and I discuss many of the topics in his new book, In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Hakwan describes his perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness, which suggests consciousness may act as a systems check between our sensory perceptions and higher cognitive functions. We also discuss his latest thoughts on mental quality space and how it relates to perceptual reality monitoring. Among many other topics, we chat about the many confounds and challenges to empirically studying consciousness, a t...2022-02-201h 25
Brain InspiredBI 127 Tomás Ryan: Memory, Instinct, and ForgettingSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Tomás and I discuss his research and ideas on how memories are encoded (the engram), the role of forgetting, and the overlapping mechanisms of memory and instinct. Tomás uses otpogenetics and other techniques to label and control neurons involved in learning and memory, and has shown that forgotten memories can be restored by stimulating "engram cells" originally associated with the forgotten memory. This line of research has led Tomás to think forgetting might be a learning mechanism itself, a adaption our...2022-02-101h 42
Brain InspiredBI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Randy and I discuss his long-standing interest in how the brain stores information to compute. That is, where is the engram, the physical trace of memory in the brain? Modern neuroscience is dominated by the view that memories are stored among synaptic connections in populations of neurons. Randy believes a more reasonable and reliable way to store abstract symbols, like numbers, is to write them into code within individual neurons. Thus, the spiking code, whatever it is, functions to write and read memories i...2022-01-311h 19
Brain InspiredBI 125 Doris Tsao, Tony Zador, Blake Richards: NAISysSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Doris, Tony, and Blake are the organizers for this year's NAISys conference, From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems (NAISys), at Cold Spring Harbor. We discuss the conference itself, some history of the neuroscience and AI interface, their current research interests, and a handful of topics around evolution, innateness, development, learning, and the current and future prospects for using neuroscience to inspire new ideas in artificial intelligence.
From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems (NAISys).Doris:@doristsao.Tsao Lab.Unsupervised deep learning identifies semantic d...2022-01-201h 11
Brain InspiredBI 124 Peter Robin Hiesinger: The Self-Assembling BrainSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Robin and I discuss many of the ideas in his book The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter. The premise is that our DNA encodes an algorithmic growth process that unfolds information via time and energy, resulting in a connected neural network (our brains!) imbued with vast amounts of information from the "start". This contrasts with modern deep learning networks, which start with minimal initial information in their connectivity, and instead rely almost solely on learning to gain their function. Robin suggests w...2022-01-051h 39
Brain InspiredBI 123 Irina Rish: Continual LearningSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Irina is a faculty member at MILA-Quebec AI Institute and a professor at Université de Montréal. She has worked from both ends of the neuroscience/AI interface, using AI for neuroscience applications, and using neural principles to help improve AI. We discuss her work on biologically-plausible alternatives to back-propagation, using "auxiliary variables" in addition to the normal connection weight updates. We also discuss the world of lifelong learning, which seeks to train networks in an online manner to improve on any tasks as...2021-12-261h 18
Brain InspiredBI 122 Kohitij Kar: Visual IntelligenceSupport the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community.
Ko and I discuss a range of topics around his work to understand our visual intelligence. Ko was a postdoc in James Dicarlo's lab, where he helped develop the convolutional neural network models that have become the standard for explaining core object recognition. He is starting his own lab at York University, where he will continue to expand and refine the models, adding important biological details and incorporating models for brain areas outside the ventral visual stream. He will also continue recording neural activity, and...2021-12-121h 33
Brain InspiredBI 121 Mac Shine: Systems NeurobiologySupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Mac and I discuss his systems level approach to understanding brains, and his theoretical work suggesting important roles for the thalamus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum, shifting the dynamical landscape of brain function within varying behavioral contexts. We also discuss his recent interest in the ascending arousal system and neuromodulators. Mac thinks the neocortex has been the sole focus of too much neuroscience research, and that the subcortical brain regions and circuits have a much larger role underlying our intelligence.
Shine LabTwitter: @jmacshineRelated pa...2021-12-021h 43
Brain InspiredBI 120 James Fitzgerald, Andrew Saxe, Weinan Sun: Optimizing MemoriesSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
James, Andrew, and Weinan discuss their recent theory about how the brain might use complementary learning systems to optimize our memories. The idea is that our hippocampus creates our episodic memories for individual events, full of particular details. And through a complementary process, slowly consolidates those memories within our neocortex through mechanisms like hippocampal replay. The new idea in their work suggests a way for the consolidated cortical memory to become optimized for generalization, something humans are known to be capable of but d...2021-11-211h 40
Brain InspiredBI 119 Henry Yin: The Crisis in NeuroscienceSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Henry and I discuss why he thinks neuroscience is in a crisis (in the Thomas Kuhn sense of scientific paradigms, crises, and revolutions). Henry thinks our current concept of the brain as an input-output device, with cognition in the middle, is mistaken. He points to the failure of neuroscience to successfully explain behavior despite decades of research. Instead, Henry proposes the brain is one big hierarchical set of control loops, trying to control their output with respect to internally generated reference signals. He w...2021-11-111h 06
Brain InspiredBI 118 Johannes Jäger: Beyond NetworksSupport the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.
Johannes (Yogi) is a freelance philosopher, researcher & educator. We discuss many of the topics in his online course, Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Living Systems. The course is focused on the role of agency in evolution, but it covers a vast range of topics: process vs. substance metaphysics, causality, mechanistic dynamic explanation, teleology, the important role of development mediating genotypes, phenotypes, and evolution, what makes biological organisms unique, the history of evolutionary theory, scientific perspectivism, and a view toward the necessity of including a...2021-11-011h 36
The Thesis Review[17] Paul Middlebrooks - Neuronal Correlates of Meta-Cognition in Primate Frontal CortexPaul Middlebrooks is a neuroscientist and host of the Brain Inspired podcast, which explores the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Paul's PhD thesis is titled "Neuronal Correlates of Meta-Cognition in Primate Frontal Cortex", which he completed at the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. We discuss Paul's work on meta-cognition - informally, thinking about thinking - then discuss neuroscience for A.I. and A.I. for neuroscience.
Episode notes: https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck/episode17.html
Follow the Thesis Review (@thesisreview) and Sean Welleck (@wellecks) on Twitter, and find out more info about the show at https://cs.nyu.edu/~welleck...2021-01-221h 36
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for EveryonePaul Middlebrooks from the Brain-Inspired podcastBS 155 is an interview with neuroscientist Paul Middlebrooks, host of the Brain-Inspired podcast. We explore the main theme of his show, which is the intersection between neuroscience and artificial intelligence. For complete show notes and episode transcripts please go to http://brainsciencepodcast.com. Announcements: Send email to brainsciencepodcast@gmail.com or post voice feedback at http://speakpipe.com/docartemis. To win an Amazon gift certificate: post a review of Brain Science in iTunes and send me a screenshot. Connect on Social Media: Twitter: @docartemis Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/brainsciencepodcast 2019-03-221h 01
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for EveryoneBS 155 Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience with Paul MiddlebrooksBS 155 is an interview with neuroscientist Paul Middlebrooks, host of the Brain-Inspired podcast. We explore the main theme of his show, which is the intersection between neuroscience and artificial intelligence. For complete show notes and episode transcripts please go to http://brainsciencepodcast.com. Announcements: Send email to brainsciencepodcast@gmail.com or post voice feedback at http://speakpipe.com/docartemis. To win an Amazon gift certificate: post a review of Brain Science in iTunes and send me a screenshot. Connect on Social Media: Twitter: @docartemis Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/brainsciencepodcast 2019-03-221h 01