The Convergent Science Podcasts on Mind, Brain and Technology

Why does the prefrontal cortex prefer not to be involved, and how does a cascade of cognitive control from premotor cortex to frontal pole organize human decision-making? Etienne Koechlin maps the hierarchical architecture of executive function. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Etienne Koechlin presents a model of prefrontal cortex function centered on the ide...

Can a monkey learn to control a single neuron in its motor cortex independently of the muscles it normally drives? Eberhard Fetz traces five decades of work on volitional neural control from biofeedback to brain-computer interfaces. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Eberhard Fetz recounts the intellectual journey from his pioneering 1969 experiments on operant...

Why can you smell a molecule you have never encountered before, and how does the nose use antagonism, binding proteins, and chemotopic maps to decode the chemical world? Tim Pierce explores the engineering principles behind biological olfaction. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Tim Pierce provides a comprehensive tour of natural olfaction, from the molecular i...

What if planning is not about computing value functions but about performing probabilistic inference? Marc Toussaint shows how recasting optimal control as message passing opens new computational pathways for robotics and decision-making. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Marc Toussaint presents a theoretical framework that reformulates planning and optimal con...

How do the hippocampus and ventral striatum coordinate to tag locations with reward value, and what happens to place cells when something motivationally significant changes? Cyriel Pennartz reveals population-level state transitions in the rat brain. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Cyriel Pennartz presents a detailed picture of how the rat brain's cognitive a...

What if consciousness evolved not to perceive the world but to survive in a world full of other minds? Paul Verschure proposes that the unified conscious scene solves a credit assignment problem created by parallel social simulations. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. In this episode, Paul Verschure is interviewed by Tony Prescott and Tim Pearce about his theor...

Can a crow that has never seen a particular problem still build the right tool to solve it, and what does that tell us about the nature of animal intelligence? Alex Kacelnik explores the boundaries between insight and learning in New Caledonian crows. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Alex Kacelnik brings a biologist's perspective to animal cognition, positioni...

Why does the monkey prefrontal cortex keep future goals and past goals in separate neural populations, and what does the frontal pole exclusively care about? Aldo Genovesio reveals how the primate brain organizes goal-directed behavior. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Aldo Genovesio presents neurophysiological findings from single-cell recordings in the monke...

How does a mouse nose with 1,200 receptor genes wire itself into a precise sensory map, and why is that map less stereotyped than we once believed? Peter Mombaerts explores the genetics and development of olfactory circuit formation. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Peter Mombaerts describes the remarkable complexity of the mouse olfactory system, where approx...

How does a 560-million-year-old fish illuminate the control architecture behind all vertebrate movement? Sten Grillner traces the neural circuits of locomotion from lamprey spinal cord to human basal ganglia. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Sten Grillner presents decades of work on the lamprey, a jawless fish that emerged during the Cambrian explosion, as a m...

Can the way we perceive forces explain how we understand both physical actions and social interactions? Peter Gärdenfors extends his conceptual spaces framework from static objects to the dynamic world of action and events. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Peter Gärdenfors introduces his theory of conceptual spaces as a geometric approach to knowledge represen...

Where in the brain does the meaning of a word live, and why does hearing "kick" activate your leg motor cortex? Friedemann Pulvermuller unpacks how the brain grounds language in sensory and motor experience. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Friedemann Pulvermuller presents a neurobiological account of word meaning that challenges traditional modular theories o...

What can a 535-million-year-old fossilized brain tell us about the origins of our own nervous system? Nick Strausfeld reveals how ancient arthropod fossils are rewriting the evolutionary history of the brain. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Nick Strausfeld makes a compelling case for why neuroscience must be grounded in evolutionary and comparative biology. H...

How does your brain decide what you're seeing before you've even finished looking? Moshe Bar reveals how the orbital frontal cortex uses blurry, low-resolution snapshots of the world to generate rapid predictions that shape perception in real time. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. In this episode, Moshe Bar challenges the textbook separation between perception...

A honeybee learns a color in five visits, generalizes matching rules across sensory modalities, and signals food distance to nestmates through dance. How does a brain with fewer than a million neurons achieve cognitive feats that challenge our understanding of intelligence? Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Srinivasan explains that insect compound eyes create a...

How do two tango dancers achieve millisecond-level coordination without a conductor? Guenther Knoblich decomposes joint action into five mechanisms, from unconscious entrainment to motor simulation, revealing that even speeding up is a sophisticated coordination strategy. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Knoblich defines joint action broadly as any coordinatio...

Watch an expert rock climber study a wall they have never seen before, and you are watching the motor system think. Giovanni Pezzulo explains how the predictive brain reuses sensorimotor knowledge for problem solving, imagery, and understanding other minds. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Pezzulo distinguishes two kinds of prediction that are often conflated...

Beneath every thought, every emotion, and every decision lies a primitive engine that neuroscience has ignored for 60 years. Donald Pfaff makes the case that generalized arousal is the essential foundation of all brain function, from fear to physics exams. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Pfaff argues that arousal has been wrongly dismissed as non-specific bac...

Can the brain's visual wiring be explained by the same engineering principles that optimize telephone networks? Dmitri Chklovskii shows how predictive coding theory and lattice filters map onto real neural circuits, from fly photoreceptors to the mammalian LGN. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Chklovskii bridges theoretical physics and neuroscience by applying...

What if vision isn't a movie playing in your head but a rapid-fire sequence of information-gathering missions, each lasting a third of a second? Dana Ballard dismantles the saliency map paradigm and reveals how dopamine, uncertainty, and internal agendas govern where your eyes go next. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Ballard opens with a fact most people find...

What will it take to build a prosthetic hand that your brain accepts as part of your own body? Maria Chiara Carrozza describes the frontier of neurorobotics, where artificial limbs must not only move on command but generate the sensory feedback that creates body ownership. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Carozza defines human-robot symbiosis as a relationship...

Why does a duck-billed platypus have electroreception, and what does that tell us about how 250 million years of evolution sculpted the six-layered cortex that makes you human? Jon Kaas traces the entire arc of mammalian brain evolution from stem reptiles to primates. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Kaas argues that understanding brain evolution is essential...

How does an ant with a brain smaller than a pinhead navigate miles of desert using visual memories that would be unrecognizable to a human eye? Andy Philippides reveals the elegant simplicity of insect navigation and why it could outperform GPS-dependent robots in denied environments. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Philippides explains why studying ants in t...

Can a robotic fish patrol harbors for pollution while swimming so quietly it never disturbs the marine life it protects? Huosheng Hu describes building fish robots that evolved from aquarium exhibits to autonomous ocean sentinels, alongside brain-controlled wheelchairs for people who cannot move. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Hu traces his journey from indu...

When will robots walk through our doors, cook our meals, and potentially steal our identities? Yoseph Bar-Cohen surveys the frontier of electroactive polymers, biomimetic actuators, and the ethical minefield of human-like machines that could one day be indistinguishable from us. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Bar-Cohen frames biomimetics as a field that touc...