Brain Inspired

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...

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Anil and I discuss a range of topics from his book, BEING YOU A New Science of Consciousness . Anil lays out his framework for explaining consciousness, which is embedded in what he calls the "real problem" of consciousness. You know the "hard problem", which was David Chalmers term for our eternal difficulties...

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Mike and I discuss his modeling approach to study cognition. Many people I have on the podcast use deep neural networks to study brains, where the idea is to train or optimize the model to perform a task, then compare the model properties with brain properties. Mike's approach is different in at least two ways....

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Steve and I discuss his book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind .  The book is a huge collection of his models and their predictions and explanations for a wide array of cognitive brain functions. Many of the models spring from his Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) framework, which ex...

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Mark and Mazviita discuss the philosophy and science of mind, and how to think about computations with respect to understanding minds. Current approaches to explaining brain function are dominated by computational models and the computer metaphor for brain and mind. But there are alternative ways to think about...

Support the show  to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . David and John discuss some of the concepts from their recent paper Two Views on the Cognitive Brain , in which they argue the recent population-based dynamical systems approach is a promising route to understanding brain activity underpinning higher cognition. We discuss mental representations, the kinds of dyn...

BI 112: Ali Mohebi and Ben Engelhard The Many Faces of Dopamine Announcement: Ben has started his new lab and is recruiting grad students. Check out his lab here and apply! Engelhard Lab   Ali and Ben discuss the ever-expanding discoveries about the roles dopamine plays for our cognition. Dopamine is known to play a role in learning – dopamine (DA) neurons fire when our reward expectati...

BI NMA 05: NLP and Generative Models Panel This is the 5th in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy , the online computational neuroscience summer school. This is the 2nd of 3 in the deep learning series. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences “doing more with fewer parameters: Convnets, RNNs, attention & transformers, generative models...

BI NMA 04: Deep Learning Basics Panel This is the 4th in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with  Neuromatch Academy , the online computational neuroscience summer school. This is the first of 3 in the deep learning series. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with some basics in deep learning, including Linear deep learning, Pytorch, multi-layer-perceptrons, optimi...

Erik, Kevin, and I discuss... well a lot of things. Erik's recent novel The Revelations is a story about a group of neuroscientists trying to develop a good theory of consciousness (with a murder mystery plot). Kevin's book Innate - How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are describes the messy process of getting from DNA, traversing epigenetics and development, to our personalities. We talk a...

Panelists: Yael Niv . @yael_niv Konrad Kording @KordingLab . Previous BI episodes: BI 027 Ioana Marinescu & Konrad Kording: Causality in Quasi-Experiments . BI 014 Konrad Kording: Regulators, Mount Up! Sam Gershman . @gershbrain . Previous BI episodes: BI 095 Chris Summerfield and Sam Gershman: Neuro for AI? BI 028 Sam Gershman: Free Energy Principle & Human Machines . Tim Behrens . @behre...

Panelists: Adrienne Fairhall . @alfairhall . Bing Brunton . @bingbrunton . Kanaka Rajan . @rajankdr . BI 054 Kanaka Rajan: How Do We Switch Behaviors? This is the second in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy , the online computational neuroscience summer school. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with linear systems, real neurons, and dynam...

Panelists: Athena Akrami : @AthenaAkrami . Demba Ba . Gunnar Blohm : @GunnarBlohm . Kunlin Wei . This is the first in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy , the online computational neuroscience summer school. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with model fitting, GLMs/machine learning, dimensionality reduction, and deep learning. Other panel...

Catherine, Jess, and I use some of the ideas from their recent papers to discuss how different types of explanations in neuroscience and AI could be unified into explanations of intelligence, natural or artificial. Catherine has written about how models are related to the target system they are built to explain. She suggests both the model and the target system should be considered as instantiatio...

Mark and I discuss a wide range of topics surrounding his Interactivism framework for explaining cognition. Interactivism stems from Mark's account of representations and how what we represent in our minds is related to the external world - a challenge that has plagued the mind-body problem since the beginning. Basically, representations are anticipated interactions with the world, that can be tru...

Grace's website Twitter:  @neurograce . Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain . We talked about Grace's work using convolutional neural networks to study vision and attention way back on episode 11 . Grace and I discuss her new book Models of the Mind , about the blossoming and conceptual foundations of the computational approa...

Steve and I discuss many topics from his new book Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness . The book covers the full range of what we know about metacognition and self-awareness, including how brains might underlie metacognitive behavior, computational models to explain mechanisms of metacognition, how and why self-awareness evolved, which animals beyond humans harbor metacognition and how to...

Jackie and Bob discuss their research and thinking about curiosity. Jackie's background is studying decision making and attention, recording neurons in nonhuman primates during eye movement tasks, and she's broadly interested in how we adapt our ongoing behavior. Curiosity is crucial for this, so she recently has focused on behavioral strategies to exercise curiosity, developing tasks that test ex...