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 . 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...

Support 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 ba...

Support 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 con...

Support 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 ar...

Support 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 t...

Support 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 e...

Support 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, causalit...