Brain Inspired

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...

Sanjeev and I discuss some of the progress toward understanding how deep learning works, specially under previous assumptions it wouldn't or shouldn't work as well as it does. Deep learning theory poses a challenge for mathematics, because its methods aren't rooted in mathematical theory and therefore are a "black box" for math to open. We discuss how Sanjeev thinks optimization, the common framew...

What is creativity? How do we measure it? How do our brains implement it, and how might AI?Those are some of the questions John, David, and I discuss. The neuroscience of creativity is young, in its "wild west" days still. We talk about a few creativity studies they've performed that distinguish different creative processes with respect to different levels of expertise (in this case, in jazz impro...

Randal, Ken, and I discuss a host of topics around the future goal of uploading our minds into non-brain systems, to continue our mental lives and expand our range of experiences. The basic requirement for such a subtrate-independent mind is to implement whole brain emulation. We discuss two basic approaches to whole brain emulation. The "scan and copy" approach proposes we somehow scan the entire...

Mark and I discuss his book, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds . It chronicles how a series of action potentials fire through the brain in a couple seconds of someone's life. Starting with light hitting the retina as a person looks at a cookie, Mark describes how that light gets translated into spikes,  how those spikes get processed in our visual system and eventually tr...

Steve and I discuss his book, How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning , which is both a memoir and a guide for teachers and students to optimize the learning experience for intrinsic motivation. Steve taught neuroscience and engineering courses while running his own lab studying the activity of live cultured neural populations (which we discuss at length in his previous episode ). He relent...

We made it to the last bit of our 100th episode celebration. These have been super fun for me, and I hope you've enjoyed the collections as well. If you're wondering where the missing 5th part is, I reserved it exclusively for Brain Inspired's magnificent Patreon supporters (thanks guys!!!!). The final question I sent to previous guests: Do we already have the right vocabulary and concepts to expl...