Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Mariam Aly runs the Aly lab at Columbia University, where she studies the interaction of memory, attention, and perception in brain regions like the hippocampus. The short story is that memory affects our perceptions, attention affects our memories, memories affect our attention, and these effects have signatures in neural activity measu...
Dec 23, 2022•1 hr 41 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Luiz Pessoa runs his Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he studies how emotion and cognition interact. On this episode, we discuss many of the topics from his latest book, The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together , which is aimed at a general audien...
Dec 10, 2022•1 hr 54 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Anne Collins runs her Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Berkley One of the things she's been working on for years is how our working memory plays a role in learning as well, and specifically how working memory and reinforcement learning interact to affect how we learn, depending on the nature of wh...
Nov 29, 2022•1 hr 22 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Carolyn Dicey Jennings is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist at University of California, Merced. In her book The Attending Mind , she lays out an attempt to unify the concept of attention. Carolyn defines attention roughly as the mental prioritization of some stuff over other stuff based on our collective interests. And one of her ...
Nov 18, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Michael L. Anderson is a professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at Western University. His book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain , calls for a re-conceptualization of how we understand and study brains and minds. Neural reuse is the phenomenon that any given brain area is active for multiple cognitive f...
Nov 08, 2022•1 hr 45 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Steve Byrnes is a physicist turned AGI safety researcher. He's concerned that when we create AGI, whenever and however that might happen, we run the risk of creating it in a less than perfectly safe way. AGI safety (AGI not doing something bad) is a wide net that encompasses AGI alignment (AGI doing what we want it to do). We discuss a host of ideas Steve writes about in his Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety blog ...
Oct 30, 2022•1 hr 31 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Dan Nicholson is a philosopher at George Mason University. He incorporates the history of science and philosophy into modern analyses of our conceptions of processes related to life and organisms. He is also interested in re-orienting our conception of the universe as made fundamentally of things/substances, and replacing it with the ide...
Oct 15, 2022•1 hr 38 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . William B. Miller is an ex-physician turned evolutionary biologist. In this episode, we discuss topics related to his new book, Bioverse: How the Cellular World Contains the Secrets to Life's Biggest Questions . The premise of the book is that all individual cells are intelligent in their own right, and possess a sense of self. From this...
Oct 05, 2022•1 hr 34 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Gaute Einevoll is a professor at the University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Use develops detailed models of brain networks to use as simulations, so neuroscientists can test their various theories and hypotheses about how networks implement various functions. Thus, the models are tools. The goal is to create models...
Sep 25, 2022•1 hr 29 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Noah Hutton writes, directs, and scores documentary and narrative films. On this episode, we discuss his documentary In Silico. In 2009, Noah watched a TED talk by Henry Markram, in which Henry claimed it would take 10 years to fully simulate a human brain. This claim inspired Noah to chronicle the project, visiting Henry and his team pe...
Sep 13, 2022•1 hr 37 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Lauren Ross is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She studies and writes about causal and non-causal explanations in philosophy of science, including distinctions among causal structures. Throughout her work, Lauren employs Jame's Woodward's interventionist approach to causation, which Jim and I discussed in ...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 23 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . James Woodward is a recently retired Professor from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Jim has tremendously influenced the field of causal explanation in the philosophy of science. His account of causation centers around intervention - intervening on a cause should alter its effect. From ...
Aug 28, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Check out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience. Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Large language models, often now called "foundation models", are the model de jour in AI, based on the transformer architecture . In this episode, I bring together Evelina Fedorenko and Emily M. Bender to discuss how language models stack up to our own language processing and generation (models and brains both excel at next-word predic...
Aug 17, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Rodolphe Sepulchre is a control engineer and theorist at Cambridge University. He focuses on applying feedback control engineering principles to build circuits that model neurons and neuronal circuits. We discuss his work on mixed feedback control - positive and negative - as an underlying principle of the mixed digital and analog brain ...
Aug 05, 2022•1 hr 25 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Cameron Buckner is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at The University of Houston. He is writing a book about the age-old philosophical debate on how much of our knowledge is innate (nature, rationalism) versus how much is learned (nurture, empiricism). In the book and his other works, Cameron argues that modern AI can help settle th...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 43 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Carina Curto is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University. She uses her background skills in mathematical physics/string theory to study networks of neurons. On this episode, we discuss the world of topology in neuroscience - the study of the geometrical structures mapped out by active populations ...
Jul 12, 2022•1 hr 32 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Jeff Schall is the director of the Center for Visual Neurophysiology at York University, where he runs the Schall Lab . His research centers around studying the mechanisms of our decisions, choices, movement control, and attention within the saccadic eye movement brain systems and in mathematical psychology models- in other words, how we...
Jun 30, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Marc Howard runs his Theoretical Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Boston University, where he develops mathematical models of cognition, constrained by psychological and neural data. In this episode, we discuss the idea that a Laplace transform and its inverse may serve as a unified framework for memory. In short, our memories are compresse...
Jun 20, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Matthew Larkum runs his lab at Humboldt University of Berlin, where his group studies how dendrites contribute to computations within and across layers of the neocortex. Since the late 1990s, Matthew has continued to uncover key properties of the way pyramidal neurons stretch across layers of the cortex, their dendrites receiving inputs ...
Jun 06, 2022•1 hr 52 min
Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Brian Butterworth is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at University College London. In his book, Can Fish Count?: What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds , he describes the counting and numerical abilities across many different species, suggesting our ability to count is evolutionarily very old (since man...
May 27, 2022•1 hr 18 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Michel Bitbol is Director of Research at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Alex Gomez-Marin is a neuroscientist running his lab, The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante. We discuss phenomenology as an alternative perspective on our scientific endeavors. Although we like to be...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 34 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Brains are often conceived as consisting of neurons and "everything else." As Elena discusses, the "everything else," including glial cells and in particular astrocytes, have largely been ignored in neuroscience. That's partly because the fast action potentials of neurons have been assumed to underlie computations in the brain, and becau...
May 06, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Srini is Emeritus Professor at Queensland Brain Institute in Australia. In this episode, he shares his wide range of behavioral experiments elucidating the principles of flight and navigation in insects. We discuss how bees use optic flow signals to determine their speed, distance, proximity to objects, and to gracefully land. These abil...
Apr 27, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Ken discusses the recent work in his lab that allows communication with subjects while they experience lucid dreams. This new paradigm opens many avenues to study the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, sleep, dreams, memory, and learning, and to improve and optimize sleep for cognition. Ken and his team are developing a Lucid ...
Apr 15, 2022•1 hr 29 min
Announcement: I'm releasing my Neuro-AI course April 10-13, after which it will be closed for some time. Learn more here. Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Ila discusses her theoretical neuroscience work suggesting how our memories are formed within the cognitive maps we use to navigate the world and navigate our thoughts. The main idea is that grid cell networks in the entorhinal cortex internally generate a structured scaffold, which gets sen...
Apr 03, 2022•1 hr 17 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Sri and Mei join me to discuss how including principles of neuromodulation in deep learning networks may improve network performance. It's an ever-present question how much detail to include in models, and we are in the early stages of learning how neuromodulators and their interactions shape biological brain function. But as we continue to learn more, Sri and Mei are interested in building "neuromodulation-awa...
Mar 26, 2022•1 hr 27 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Eve discusses many of the lessons she has learned studying a small nervous system, the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system (STG). The STG has only about 30 neurons and its connections and neurophysiology are well-understood. Yet Eve's work has shown it functions under a remarkable diversity of conditions, and does so is a remarkable variety of ways. We discuss her work on the STG specifically, and what her...
Mar 13, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Patryk and I discuss his wide-ranging background working in both the neuroscience and AI worlds, and his resultant perspective on what's needed to move forward in AI, including some principles of brain processes that are more and less important. We also discuss his own work using some of those principles to help deep learning generalize to better capture how humans behave in and perceive the world. Patryk's hom...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 21 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Hakwan and I discuss many of the topics in his new book, In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience . Hakwan describes his perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness, which suggests consciousness may act as a systems check between our sensory perceptions and higher cognitive functions. We also discuss his latest thoughts on mental quality space and how it relates t...
Feb 20, 2022•1 hr 26 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Tomás and I discuss his research and ideas on how memories are encoded (the engram), the role of forgetting, and the overlapping mechanisms of memory and instinct. Tomás uses otpogenetics and other techniques to label and control neurons involved in learning and memory, and has shown that forgotten memories can be restored by stimulating "engram cells" originally associated with the forgotten memory. This line ...
Feb 10, 2022•1 hr 43 min
