Brain Space Time Podcast

I just visited the ESI SyNC 2024 conference on the topic of "Time in the brain". There, I interviewed Hugo Merchant, an electrophysiologist at UNAM in Juriquilla, Mexico. Hugo works with macaques, who can rhythmically tap their fingers synchronized to a visual or auditory beat. By studying macaque neural activity in dimensionality-reduced spaces, he wants to understand how the brain encodes differ...

Uri Hasson runs a lab in Princeton, where he investigates the underlying neural basis of natural language acquisition and processing as it unfolds in the real world. As Uri visited Tübingen (where I am doing my master's), we were able to meet in person. Originally, I planned to talk about his idea of temporal receptive windows, and how different brain regions (e.g. default mode network) operat...

Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at the Trinity College Dublin. He recently published his second book, " Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will ." It's a rigorous defense for why we (and other living systems) have free will, arguing all the way from quantum indeterminacy, to C. elegans, to how humans can form abstracted meanings over very lo...

Kate Jeffery is the head of the school of psychology & neuroscience at the University of Glasgow (formerly at UCL). This episode is all about grid cells ( background info ), which Kate was already recording in the 1990s. We discuss how grid cells' rate maps differ when the rats climb in 3D spaces. Here we cover anything from cross-species comparisons (bats, birds), to self-organizing dynam...

Two weeks ago, I visited the Bernstein conference in Berlin. I had lots of fun, particularly at the poster sessions, where I met William, Movitz, and Shervin. I met with each of them later and recorded the following conversations (on bark benches again^^). William Walker (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, London) had a poster on 'Representations of State in Hippocampus Derive from a Prin...

An 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...

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the ESI SyNC 2023 conference in at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) in Frankfurt, Germany. Their topic was "Linking hypotheses: where neuroscience, computation, and cognition meet". During the conference, I got talking to Yossi Yovel (Tel-Aviv University) about how different bat species navigate, what their vocalizations tell us about language evoluti...

This episode, I talk to Saeedeh Sadeghi (Cornell University) and Irena Arslanova (Royal Holloway - London) about the heart and time perception. If you have ever been in a car accident, you might have felt as if time was slowing down. Some previous studies have tried to explain this phenomenon and argued that a state of 'arousal' may slow down time (subjectively). It's a bit more compli...

In the first episode of the Brain Space Time Podcast, I talk to Georg Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and philosopher based in Ottawa, Canada. Georg argues that the self and time are fundamental to how the brain constructs a model of the world. We start off with the role of spontaneous activity in the brain, including the role of the default mode network, although Georg might convince you...

In this short episode, I give a rough outline of what the Brain Space Time podcast will be about! Timestamps: (00:00) - What is the Brain Space Time Podcast about? (01:39) - The podcast logo explained.  (05:28) - Getting in touch.  Links Show notes for this episode (with Bergson's cone figure) Henri Bergson's 1986 Matter and memory PDF (Cone figure on p. 61) Uri Hasson on temporal recept...