Brain Inspired

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.

Last refreshed: July 7th, 2025 at 7:23 AM ⓘ

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Episodes

BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Randy and I discuss his long-standing interest in how the brain stores information to compute. That is, where is the engram, the physical trace of memory in the brain? Modern neuroscience is dominated by the view that memories are stored among synaptic connections in populations of neurons. Randy believes a more reasonable and reliable way to store abstract symbols, like numbers, is to write them into code with...

Jan 31, 2022•1 hr 20 min

BI 125 Doris Tsao, Tony Zador, Blake Richards: NAISys

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Doris, Tony, and Blake are the organizers for this year's NAISys conference, From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems (NAISys) , at Cold Spring Harbor. We discuss the conference itself, some history of the neuroscience and AI interface, their current research interests, and a handful of topics around evolution, innateness, development, learning, and the current and future prospects for using neuros...

Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 11 min

BI 124 Peter Robin Hiesinger: The Self-Assembling Brain

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Robin and I discuss many of the ideas in his book The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter . The premise is that our DNA encodes an algorithmic growth process that unfolds information via time and energy, resulting in a connected neural network (our brains!) imbued with vast amounts of information from the "start". This contrasts with modern deep learning networks, which start with minimal in...

Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 39 min

BI 123 Irina Rish: Continual Learning

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 back-propagation, using "auxiliary variables" in addition to the normal connection weight updates. We a...

Dec 26, 2021•1 hr 19 min

BI 122 Kohitij Kar: Visual Intelligence

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 continue to expand and refine the models, adding important biological details and incorporating models ...

Dec 12, 2021•1 hr 33 min

BI 121 Mac Shine: Systems Neurobiology

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 arousal system and neuromodulators. Mac thinks the neocortex has been the sole focus of too much neuros...

Dec 02, 2021•1 hr 43 min

BI 120 James Fitzgerald, Andrew Saxe, Weinan Sun: Optimizing Memories

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 those memories within our neocortex through mechanisms like hippocampal replay. The new idea in their ...

Nov 21, 2021•1 hr 40 min

BI 119 Henry Yin: The Crisis in Neuroscience

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 explain behavior despite decades of research. Instead, Henry proposes the brain is one big hierarchica...

Nov 11, 2021•1 hr 7 min

BI 118 Johannes Jäger: Beyond Networks

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, causality, mechanistic dynamic explanation, teleology, the important role of development mediating genotypes,...

Nov 01, 2021•1 hr 36 min

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