From Our Neurons to Yours

Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries. We're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the archives: our 2024 conversation with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Hend...

This week on the show, we're have our sights set on healthy aging. What would it mean to be able to live to 80, 90 or 100 with our cognitive abilities intact and able to maintain an independent lifestyle right to the end of our days?  We're joined by Beth Mormino and Anthony Wagner who lead the Stanford Aging and Memory Study , which recruits cognitively healthy older adults to understan...

This week on the show: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain?  Last month, Stanford researcher Andreas Tolias and colleagues created a "digital twin" of the mouse visual cortex. The researchers used the same foundation model approach that powers ChatGPT, but instead of training the model on text, the team trained in on brain activity recorded while mice watched action...

If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word.  But today on the show, let&ap...

We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia sc...

As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve. Today...

We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early w...

Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament." In his latest book, Determined , Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as muc...

Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression. We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelic...

Today, we are going back into the archives for one of my favorite episodes: We are talking to neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, David Eagleman. We're talking about synaesthesia — and if you don't know what that is, you're about to find out. Special Note We are beyond thrilled that From Our Neurons to Yours has won a 2024 Signal Award in the Science Podcast categ...

Earlier this year, President Obama's signature BRAIN Initiative, which has powered advances in neuroscience for the past 10 years, had its budget slashed by 40%.   Over the past decade, the BRAIN Initiative made roughly $4 billion in targeted investments in more than 1500 research projects across the country and has dramatically accelerated progress tackling fundamental challenges in neurosci...

Given the widespread legalization of cannabis for medical and recreational uses, you'd think we'd have a better understanding of how it works. But ask a neuroscientist exactly how cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD alter our perceptions or lead to potential medical benefits, and you'll soon learn just how little we know. We know that these molecules hijack an ancient signaling s...

Today we are re-releasing an episode we did last year with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo exploring the intersection of memory, navigation and the boundaries we create between ourselves and the world around us. This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want...

In the past few years, Big Pharma has released not one, but three new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Aducanemab (2021), Lecanemab (2023), and Donanemab (2024), are the first treatments to effectively clear the brain of amyloid plaques — the sticky protein clumps whose build-up in the brain has defined the disease for decades. The problem? They may not help patients at all. Today’s guest, Stan...

Getting help for depression can be like purgatory. Setting aside for a moment the stigma and other barriers to seeking treatment in the first place, finding the right combination of medication and/or therapy can be a months- or years-long process of trial and error. And for about one third of people, nothing seems to work. Today we're talking with Dr. Leanne Williams , the founding director o...

Today, we're talking with Stanford neuro-oncologist, Michelle Monje . This is actually the third time we've had Michelle on the show, in part because she's been a pioneer of three exciting frontiers in neuroscience — so far!  This week, we're going to talk about cancer neuroscience. Michelle founded this new field with her discovery that deadly brain tumors not only link up phy...

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about using new techniques for growing human brain tissue in the lab to solve a rare neurological disorder. Host Nicholas Weiler sits down with Sergiu Pasca an innovative Stanford scientist who has developed groundbreaking technologies to grow human brain tissue in the lab, creating "organoids" and "assembloids" that mo...

Today, we're going to talk about virtual reality and how it could be used to treat depression. We're talking with psychiatrist Kim Bullock , the founding director of Stanford's Neurobehavioral Clinic and Virtual Reality & Immersive Technologies (VRIT) program.  Dr. Bullock — a physician certified in Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatry, and Lifestyle Medicine — calls herself a "radi...

The skin is full of contradictions. It’s soft and sensitive, but also tough and resilient, even self-healing. It’s both the barrier that protects us from infections and our most intimate connection with the outside world.  Today’s guest, Zhenan Bao , has spent the last two decades reverse engineering the skin’s many remarkable properties in order to create wearable electronics that are just as sof...

This week, we're diving into recent research that sheds light on a new form of brain plasticity involving changes in the insulation of nerve fibers — called myelin.  It turns out that myelin plasticity is implicated in a number of serious conditions, from epilepsy to drug abuse and addiction. We're excited to bring back two previous guests on the show to share their insights on this prev...

-- We're re-releasing our conversation with Carla Shatz, one of our favorites from the archive, which comes up all the time on the show in the context of brain plasticity and aging. Enjoy, and see you next time! -NW --   When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains beco...

Hi everyone — quick programming announcement. As we head into summer, we'll be moving to an every-other-week cadence as we prepare more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience. I'm very excited about what we're working on for you, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu with your thoughts, praise, critiques, o...

The powerful new generation of AI tools that has come out over the past few years —  DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest — have blown away our old ideas about what AI can do and raised questions about what it means for computers to start acting... intelligent? This week, we ask what the rise of these systems might teach us about our own biological intelligence — and vice versa. What does...

At some point in our lives, we all struggle with memory — learning a new name, remembering that book you were reading just yesterday or that word on the tip of your tongue. So what can neuroscience teach us about why we remember, why we forget, and how we might even improve our memories? To answer this question, I spoke with neuroscientist Anthony Wagner , a memory expert in Stanford's Depart...

Today, we're going to talk about how psychedelics alter our perception of reality and what that says about... reality! Welcome  to part two of our conversation with Stanford anesthesiologist and psychedelics researcher Boris Heifets ! Last time , we talked with Boris about the question of why psychedelics help people with mental health disorders. This week, we're going to dive into a dif...