The Convergent Science Podcasts on Mind, Brain and Technology

How do you align 104 musicians, a world-class conductor, management teams, sponsors, and audiences toward a single artistic vision , while navigating a global pandemic? Ilona Schmiel, artistic and executive director of the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft Zürich, reveals the collaborative architecture behind one of Europe's oldest orchestras. Subscribe for more episodes on how collaboration works in practice...

Every children's book teaches your kid to be the lone hero. Goldman Sachs Managing Director Eva Wiecko argues this hero culture is the single biggest obstacle to collaboration , in boardrooms, in society, and in how we raise the next generation. Listen to her perspective on what high-stakes M&A transactions reveal about human nature. Subscribe for more episodes on real-world collaboration. Eva...

What does the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the culture of Japanese banking, and a €40 billion utility deal reveal about how collaboration actually works in high-stakes financial transactions? Alexander Nuyken, EY's Life Science Strategy and Transactions Leader for EMEIA, shares lessons from two decades of deal-making across continents. Subscribe for more episodes on collaboration under real-world...

What if inflammation is not a disease but a communication system , one that becomes pathological only when its own signaling cascades spiral beyond the control mechanisms that normally contain them? Immunologist Yoram Vodovotz reframes inflammation as the body's intermediate-timescale information network, connecting injury detection to healing response, and explains why understanding its failure r...

Why is touch the most fundamental sense and yet the least understood? Haptics researcher Vincent Hayward argues that the field lacks the theoretical foundations that vision achieved decades ago , and that the key to unlocking touch lies in recognizing that mechanical sensing is inherently non-local, dynamic, and distributed far beyond the skin. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Networ...

What if epilepsy is not a broken circuit but a network pushed into the wrong dynamical state , and what if computational models could guide surgeons to intervene without destroying healthy tissue? Physicist Viktor Jirsa explains how whole-brain mean field models are transforming epilepsy from a localized lesion problem into a network science challenge with direct clinical implications. Subscribe f...

How does the brain build its own maps, and what constrains the patterns that evolution can produce? Computational neuroscientist Stuart Wilson argues that cortical arealization emerges from self-organizing processes operating within the design space defined by reaction-diffusion dynamics , not from a genetic blueprint that specifies each area independently. Subscribe for more from the Convergent S...

Can a magnetic pulse to the forehead restore what drugs have broken in the addicted brain? Pharmacologist Marco Diana explains how chronic drug use produces a hypodopaminergic state, a massive downregulation of the dopamine system, and why transcranial magnetic stimulation may offer a physiological alternative to treating addiction when no effective drugs exist. Subscribe for more from the Converg...

How does the brain decide what to remember and what to forget , even while you sleep? Memory researcher Lluís Fuentemilla reveals that targeted reactivation during slow-wave sleep can boost or suppress specific memories, and that the sleeping brain actively distinguishes between competing memory traces using different neural signatures. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcas...

Does the brain see the world or predict it? Visual neuroscientist Lars Muckli presents evidence that early visual cortex receives top-down predictive signals from higher areas, challenging the textbook view of vision as a purely bottom-up feature extraction process and raising hard questions about where prediction ends and perception begins. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network p...

Can we build a mind, and if so, what would that tell us about who we are? AI researcher Joscha Bach argues that the path to artificial general intelligence runs through understanding the mind as a model-making system in the service of organismic regulation , and that current deep learning, while surprisingly powerful, has not yet solved the fundamental problems of grounding, abduction, and epistem...

Why do some prefrontal neurons hold steady while others rapidly switch what they represent? Neuroscientist Encarni Marcos reveals that the prefrontal cortex operates through a continuum of neural stability and flexibility , where heterogeneous populations simultaneously maintain goals in memory and dynamically transform them into actions. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podc...

What if half the brain's cells are doing something essential that neuroscience has barely begun to investigate? Elena Galea makes the case that astrocytes, long dismissed as passive glue, are active computational elements that tile the brain in a precise three-dimensional matrix, modulate neural circuits, control blood flow, and may hold the key to understanding memory and higher brain function. S...

Can scientists really govern themselves ethically, or does responsible research require something more than collective reflection? Christine Aicardi unpacks the AREA framework for responsible research and innovation, revealing both its promise and its structural limitations when applied inside large-scale projects like the Human Brain Project. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network...

How many systems does the mammalian brain actually have, and what is each one really doing? Neuroscientist Bjorn Merker challenges conventional anatomical boundaries and proposes that the brain's major subdivisions, neocortex, cerebellum, basal ganglia, and brainstem, each perform a distinct generic function, running in parallel all the time rather than switching on and off. Subscribe for more fro...

What if the most famous experiment against free will was measuring the wrong thing all along? Neuroscientist Aaron Schurger explains why the readiness potential, long interpreted as the brain's decision signal, may be nothing more than autocorrelated neural noise crossing a threshold, fundamentally undermining decades of conclusions drawn from the Libet experiment. Subscribe for more from the Conv...

What if the mathematics behind neural networks could unlock the secrets of the immune system? Physicist Ton Coolen reveals how techniques from statistical mechanics, originally developed for obscure magnetic materials, now expose deep structural parallels between how brains store memories and how immune systems learn to fight disease. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast...

What would it take to build a true science of the mind , one that combines brain theory, robotics, and behavior into a unified framework? Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott reflect on a decade of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and engineering, asking whether synthetic models can finally deliver the explanatory theories that biology alone has failed to pro...

How does the hippocampus know where you are when all it receives is egocentric sensory input? Computational neuroscientist Neil Burgess explains how boundary vector cells provide the missing link , translating distances to environmental features into the allocentric place code that underpins spatial memory and navigation. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Neil...

How does the brain understand what another person is doing without having to think about it? Giacomo Rizzolatti, who discovered mirror neurons, explains why action understanding is rooted in the motor system , and why the concept must now expand from individual mirror neurons to a mirror brain that spans parietal, premotor, and motor cortex. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network p...

Why do grid cells, the brain's metric system for space, appear last in development, days after place cells and head direction cells are already active? Neuroscientist Francesca Cacucci explains what the developmental sequence of spatial circuits in the rat hippocampus reveals about how the navigation system bootstraps itself, and why the sudden emergence of grid cells around postnatal day 20 may m...

Why do two anesthetics with opposite effects on the brain's inhibitory system both produce unconsciousness , and what does the difference between them reveal about the neural architecture of conscious access? Anesthesiologist Lynn Uhrig and neuroscientist Bechir Jarraya explain how the local-global auditory paradigm, combined with propofol and ketamine in macaque monkeys, is dissecting the frontop...

What if one-third of patients diagnosed as vegetative are actually conscious but trapped in bodies that cannot respond? Consciousness researcher Aurore Thibaut explains the 30% misdiagnosis rate in disorders of consciousness and how combining brain stimulation with complexity measures may finally give clinicians a reliable window into awareness when behavior fails. Subscribe for more from the Conv...

What if evolution discovered that information itself is the most reliable local gradient for finding good solutions? Computer scientist Daniel Polani explains how information theory provides a normative framework for understanding why sensors are optimized, why brains are expensive, and why cognition is fundamentally constrained by the physics of embodiment. Subscribe for more from the Convergent...

Can you infiltrate a cockroach colony with robots and steer its collective decisions? Physicist José Halloy explains how simple mathematical models from statistical physics capture the self-organizing behavior of animal groups , and how biomimetic robots that smell like cockroaches can be used to test and manipulate these models from the inside. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Netwo...