Brain Inspired

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 abo...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 simu...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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,...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 acc...

Check out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience. Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 sta...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 feedbac...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 (nu...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 transf...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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 pro...

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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...

Support 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 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 di...

Support 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 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...

Support 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 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...

Support 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 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, an...

Announcement: I'm releasing my Neuro-AI course April 10-13, after which it will be closed for some time. Learn more here. Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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...

Support 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 fu...

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . 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, a...

Support 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...

Support 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...

Support 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...

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...

Support 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 aroun...

Support 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 informa...