Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Mazviita Chirimuuta is a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh. Today we discuss topics from her new book, The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience . She largely argues that when we try to understand something complex, like the brain, using models, and math, and analogies, for example - we should keep in mind these are all ways of simplifying and abstracting away d...
Mar 25, 2024•1 hr 44 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . As some of you know, I recently got back into the research world, and in particular I work in Eric Yttris' lab at Carnegie Mellon University. Eric's lab studies the relationship between various kinds of behaviors and the neural activity in a few areas known to be involved in enacting and shaping those behaviors, namely the motor cortex and basal ganglia. And study that, he uses tools like optogentics, neuronal ...
Mar 06, 2024•1 hr 45 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Peter Stratton is a research scientist at Queensland University of Technology. I was pointed toward Pete by a patreon supporter, who sent me a sort of perspective piece Pete wrote that is the main focus of our conversation, although we also talk about some of his work in particular - for example, he works with spiking neural networks, like my last guest, Dan Goodman . What Pete argues for is what he calls a sid...
Feb 20, 2024•1 hr 31 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . You may know my guest as the co-founder of Neuromatch, the excellent online computational neuroscience academy, or as the creator of the Brian spiking neural network simulator, which is freely available. I know him as a spiking neural network practitioner extraordinaire. Dan Goodman runs the Neural Reckoning Group at Imperial College London, where they use spiking neural networks to figure out how biological an...
Feb 06, 2024•1 hr 29 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 John Krakauer has been on the podcast multiple times (see links below). Today we discuss some topics framed around what he's been working on and thinking about lately. Things like Whether brains actually reorganize after damage The role of brain plasticity in general The path toward and the path not toward understanding higher cognition ...
Jan 19, 2024•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 By day, Max Bennett is an entrepreneur. He has cofounded and CEO'd multiple AI and technology companies. By many other countless hours, he has studied brain related sciences. Those long hours of research have payed off in the form of this book, A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brain...
Dec 25, 2023•1 hr 28 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . Welcome to another special panel discussion episode. I was recently invited to moderate at discussion amongst 6 people at the annual Aspirational Neuroscience meetup. Aspirational Neuroscience is a nonprofit community run by Kenneth Hayworth. Ken has been on the podcast before on episode 103 . Ken helps me introduce the meetup and panel discussion for a few minutes. The goal in general was to discuss how curren...
Dec 11, 2023•1 hr 29 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 Laura Gradowski is a philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh. Pluralism is roughly the idea that there is no unified account of any scientific field, that we should be tolerant of and welcome a variety of theoretical and conceptual frameworks, and methods, and goals, when doing science. Pluralism is kind of a buzz word rig...
Nov 27, 2023•1 hr 39 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 Eric Shea-Brown is a theoretical neuroscientist and principle investigator of the working group on neural dynamics at the University of Washington. In this episode, we talk a lot about dynamics and dimensionality in neural networks... how to think about them, why they matter, how Eric's perspectives have changed through his career. We di...
Nov 13, 2023•1 hr 36 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . I was recently invited to moderate a panel at the Annual Bernstein conference - this one was in Berlin Germany. The panel I moderated was at a satellite workshop at the conference called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? Below are the panelists. I hope you enjoy the discussion! Program: How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuros...
Oct 30, 2023•1 hr 14 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . David runs his lab at NYU , where they stud`y auditory cognition, speech perception, language, and music. On the heels of the episode with David Glanzman , we discuss the ongoing mystery regarding how memory works, how to study and think about brains and minds, and the reemergence (perhaps) of the language of thought hypothesis. David has been on the podcast a few times... once by himself , and again with Gyorg...
Oct 14, 2023•1 hr 24 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 Kevin Mitchell is professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. He's been on the podcast before , and we talked a little about his previous book, Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. He's back today to discuss his new book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will . The book is written very well and guides the r...
Oct 03, 2023•1 hr 47 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 . Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher and has been interested in complexity since before it was cool. In this episode, we discuss many of the topics and ideas in her new book, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence , which makes the thorough case that constraints should be given way more attention when trying to understa...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 45 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . In the intro, I mention the Bernstein conference workshop I'll participate in, called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? . Follow that link to learn more, and register for the conference here . Hope to see you there in late September in Berlin! Justin Wood runs the Wood Lab at Indiana University, and his lab's tagline is "building newborn minds in virtual worlds....
Aug 30, 2023•1 hr 36 min
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community . David runs his lab at UCLA where he's also a distinguished professor. David used to believe what is currently the mainstream view, that our memories are stored in our synapses, those connections between our neurons. So as we learn, the synaptic connections strengthen and weaken until their just right, and that serves to preserve the memory. That's been the dominant view in neuroscience for decades, and is the f...
Aug 07, 2023•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 My guest is Michael C. Frank, better known as Mike Frank, who runs the Language and Cognition lab at Stanford. Mike's main interests center on how children learn language - in particular he focuses a lot on early word learning, and what that tells us about our other cognitive functions, like concept formation and social cognition. We dis...
Jul 22, 2023•1 hr 25 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 In this episode I have a casual chat with Ali Mohebi about his new faculty position and his plans for the future. Ali's website . Twitter: @mohebial...
Jul 11, 2023•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 My guest today is Andrea Martin, who is the Research Group Leader in the department of Language and Computation in Neural Systems at the Max Plank Institute and the Donders Institute. Andrea is deeply interested in understanding how our biological brains process and represent language. To this end, she is developing a theoretical model o...
Jun 28, 2023•1 hr 42 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 . This is one in a periodic series of episodes with Alex Gomez-Marin , exploring how the arts and humanities can impact (neuro)science. Artistic creations, like cinema, have the ability to momentarily lower our ever-critical scientific mindset and allow us to imagine alternate possibilities and experience emotions outside our normal scient...
Jun 02, 2023•1 hr 55 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 Panayiota Poirazi runs the Poirazi Lab at the FORTH Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and Yiota loves dendrites, those branching tree-like structures sticking out of all your neurons, and she thinks you should love dendrites, too, whether you study biological or artificial intelligence. In neuroscience, the old story was ...
May 27, 2023•1 hr 28 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 Nick Enfield is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney. In this episode we discuss topics in his most recent book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists . A central question in the book is what is language for? What's the function of language. You might be familiar with the debate a...
May 09, 2023•1 hr 27 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 . Jeffrey Bowers is a psychologist and professor at the University of Bristol. As you know, many of my previous guests are in the business of comparing brain activity to the activity of units in artificial neural network models, when humans or animals and the models are performing the same tasks. And a big story that has emerged over the p...
Apr 12, 2023•1 hr 39 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 Gary Lupyan runs the Lupyan Lab at University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he studies how language and cognition are related. In some ways, this is a continuation of the conversation I had last episode with Ellie Pavlick , in that we partly continue to discuss large language models. But Gary is more focused on how language, and naming th...
Apr 01, 2023•1 hr 32 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 Ellie Pavlick runs her Language Understanding and Representation Lab at Brown University, where she studies lots of topics related to language. In AI, large language models, sometimes called foundation models, are all the rage these days, with their ability to generate convincing language, although they still make plenty of mistakes. One...
Mar 20, 2023•1 hr 22 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 Earl Miller runs the Miller Lab at MIT, where he studies how our brains carry out our executive functions, like working memory, attention, and decision-making. In particular he is interested in the role of the prefrontal cortex and how it coordinates with other brain areas to carry out these functions. During this episode, we talk broadl...
Mar 08, 2023•1 hr 23 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 Hugo Spiers runs the Spiers Lab at University College London. In general Hugo is interested in understanding spatial cognition, like navigation, in relation to other processes like planning and goal-related behavior, and how brain areas like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex coordinate these cognitive functions. So, in this episode, ...
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 35 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 Ole Jensen is co-director of the Centre for Human Brain Health at University of Birmingham, where he runs his Neuronal Oscillations Group lab. Ole is interested in how the oscillations in our brains affect our cognition by helping to shape the spiking patterns of neurons, and by helping to allocate resources to parts of our brains that a...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 29 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 Chris Summerfield runs the Human Information Processing Lab at University of Oxford, and he's a research scientist at Deepmind. You may remember him from episode 95 with Sam Gershman , when we discussed ideas around the usefulness of neuroscience and psychology for AI. Since then, Chris has released his book, Natural General Intelligence...
Jan 26, 2023•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 . Paul Rosenbloom is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. In the early 1980s, Paul , along with John Laird and the early AI pioneer Alan Newell, developed one the earliest and best know cognitive architectures called SOAR. A cognitive architecture, as Paul defines it, is a model of the fixed stru...
Jan 16, 2023•1 hr 35 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 Sarah Robins is a philosopher at the University of Kansas, one a growing handful of philosophers specializing in memory. Much of her work focuses on memory traces, which is roughly the idea that somehow our memories leave a trace in our minds. We discuss memory traces themselves and how they relate to the engram (see BI 126 Randy Gallist...
Jan 02, 2023•1 hr 21 min
