A generation ago, a big clot in the brain meant paralysis or worse. Today, doctors can diagnose clots on AI-enabled brain scans; provide life-saving, targeted medications; or snake a catheter from a patient’s groin into the brain to vacuum out the clot. If they intervene in time, they can watch speech and movement return before the sedatives wear off. How did that happen—and what’s still missing? In this episode of From Our Neurons to Yours , Stanford neuroscientist and neurocritical care specia...
Jun 26, 2025•35 min•Season 7Ep. 9
We've all heard stories about someone who went in for surgery and came out...different. A grandmother who struggled with names after hip replacement, or an uncle who seemed foggy for months following cardiac bypass. But why does this happen to some people while others bounce right back? This week, we explore this question with Dr. Martin Angst, a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford who's studying the biological factors that determine cognitive outcomes after surgery. With support from the Kn...
Jun 12, 2025•38 min•Season 7Ep. 8
Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries. We're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the archives: our 2024 conversation with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological dis...
May 29, 2025•22 min•Season 7Ep. 7
This week on the show, we're have our sights set on healthy aging. What would it mean to be able to live to 80, 90 or 100 with our cognitive abilities intact and able to maintain an independent lifestyle right to the end of our days? We're joined by Beth Mormino and Anthony Wagner who lead the Stanford Aging and Memory Study , which recruits cognitively healthy older adults to understand what makes their brains particularly resilient — and how more of us could join them in living the dream of he...
May 15, 2025•37 min•Season 7Ep. 6
This week on the show: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain? Last month, Stanford researcher Andreas Tolias and colleagues created a "digital twin" of the mouse visual cortex. The researchers used the same foundation model approach that powers ChatGPT, but instead of training the model on text, the team trained in on brain activity recorded while mice watched action movies. The result? A digital model that can predict how neurons would respond to entirely new visual inputs. T...
May 01, 2025•33 min•Season 7Ep. 5
If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word. But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human brain, w...
Apr 17, 2025•43 min•Season 7Ep. 4
We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia science was founded here at Stanford in the lab of the late, great Ben Barres. No one is better suited to take us through this ...
Apr 03, 2025•35 min•Season 7Ep. 3
As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve. Today we're going to be talking with neuroscientists who aim to solve this problem with sound. And not just any...
Mar 20, 2025•31 min•Season 7Ep. 2
We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease. To unpack this complex relationship, we're thrilled to welcome back Erin Gibson, assistan...
Mar 06, 2025•39 min•Season 7Ep. 1
Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament." In his latest book, Determined , Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and en...
Dec 05, 2024•41 min•Season 6Ep. 7
Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression. We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelics trial? What do we know about how placebo actually works in the brain? And should we view the placebo ef...
Nov 21, 2024•35 min•Season 6Ep. 6
Today, we are going back into the archives for one of my favorite episodes: We are talking to neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, David Eagleman. We're talking about synaesthesia — and if you don't know what that is, you're about to find out. Special Note We are beyond thrilled that From Our Neurons to Yours has won a 2024 Signal Award in the Science Podcast category. It's a big honor — thanks to everyone who voted! --- Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about ...
Nov 07, 2024•22 min•Season 6Ep. 5
Earlier this year, President Obama's signature BRAIN Initiative, which has powered advances in neuroscience for the past 10 years, had its budget slashed by 40%. Over the past decade, the BRAIN Initiative made roughly $4 billion in targeted investments in more than 1500 research projects across the country and has dramatically accelerated progress tackling fundamental challenges in neuroscience. As we head into the next federal budget cycle, the future of the initiative remains uncertain. Today ...
Oct 24, 2024•39 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Given the widespread legalization of cannabis for medical and recreational uses, you'd think we'd have a better understanding of how it works. But ask a neuroscientist exactly how cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD alter our perceptions or lead to potential medical benefits, and you'll soon learn just how little we know. We know that these molecules hijack an ancient signaling system in the brain called the "endocannabinoid" system (translation: the "cannabinoids within"). These somewhat exo...
Oct 10, 2024•38 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Today we are re-releasing an episode we did last year with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo exploring the intersection of memory, navigation and the boundaries we create between ourselves and the world around us. This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can me...
Sep 26, 2024•26 min•Season 6Ep. 2
In the past few years, Big Pharma has released not one, but three new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Aducanemab (2021), Lecanemab (2023), and Donanemab (2024), are the first treatments to effectively clear the brain of amyloid plaques — the sticky protein clumps whose build-up in the brain has defined the disease for decades. The problem? They may not help patients at all. Today’s guest, Stanford neurologist Mike Greicius , considers the new amyloid-clearing drugs a major disappointment — a...
Sep 12, 2024•26 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Getting help for depression can be like purgatory. Setting aside for a moment the stigma and other barriers to seeking treatment in the first place, finding the right combination of medication and/or therapy can be a months- or years-long process of trial and error. And for about one third of people, nothing seems to work. Today we're talking with Dr. Leanne Williams , the founding director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness and Vincent V.C. Woo Professor in the Stan...
Aug 29, 2024•28 min•Season 5Ep. 6
Today, we're talking with Stanford neuro-oncologist, Michelle Monje . This is actually the third time we've had Michelle on the show, in part because she's been a pioneer of three exciting frontiers in neuroscience — so far! This week, we're going to talk about cancer neuroscience. Michelle founded this new field with her discovery that deadly brain tumors not only link up physically with the healthy brain tissue surrounding them, but the cancers actually need the brain's electrical activity to ...
Aug 15, 2024•21 min•Season 5Ep. 5
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about using new techniques for growing human brain tissue in the lab to solve a rare neurological disorder. Host Nicholas Weiler sits down with Sergiu Pasca an innovative Stanford scientist who has developed groundbreaking technologies to grow human brain tissue in the lab, creating "organoids" and "assembloids" that model brain disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Pasca describes the process of turning patient skin cells into embryo-like...
Aug 01, 2024•31 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Today, we're going to talk about virtual reality and how it could be used to treat depression. We're talking with psychiatrist Kim Bullock , the founding director of Stanford's Neurobehavioral Clinic and Virtual Reality & Immersive Technologies (VRIT) program. Dr. Bullock — a physician certified in Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatry, and Lifestyle Medicine — calls herself a "radical behaviorist." Like other practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), she sees the troublesome thoughts and e...
Jul 18, 2024•22 min•Season 5Ep. 3
The skin is full of contradictions. It’s soft and sensitive, but also tough and resilient, even self-healing. It’s both the barrier that protects us from infections and our most intimate connection with the outside world. Today’s guest, Zhenan Bao , has spent the last two decades reverse engineering the skin’s many remarkable properties in order to create wearable electronics that are just as soft, flexible, and versatile as the skin itself. Bao envisions a world where stick-on devices could hel...
Jul 04, 2024•24 min•Season 5Ep. 2
This week, we're diving into recent research that sheds light on a new form of brain plasticity involving changes in the insulation of nerve fibers — called myelin. It turns out that myelin plasticity is implicated in a number of serious conditions, from epilepsy to drug abuse and addiction. We're excited to bring back two previous guests on the show to share their insights on this previously unknown form of plasticity: Stanford psychiatry professor Rob Malenka ( S1 E1 - Psychedelics and Empathy...
Jun 20, 2024•23 min•Season 5Ep. 1
-- We're re-releasing our conversation with Carla Shatz, one of our favorites from the archive, which comes up all the time on the show in the context of brain plasticity and aging. Enjoy, and see you next time! -NW -- When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible. You may have heard of a concept called...
Jun 06, 2024•22 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Hi everyone — quick programming announcement. As we head into summer, we'll be moving to an every-other-week cadence as we prepare more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience. I'm very excited about what we're working on for you, so stay tuned! In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu with your thoughts, praise, critiques, or just to say hello. That's all for now. See you next time! Send us a text! Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our...
May 30, 2024•25 sec
The powerful new generation of AI tools that has come out over the past few years — DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest — have blown away our old ideas about what AI can do and raised questions about what it means for computers to start acting... intelligent? This week, we ask what the rise of these systems might teach us about our own biological intelligence — and vice versa. What does modern neuroscience have to say about how AI could become as flexible, efficient, and resilient as t...
May 23, 2024•28 min•Season 4Ep. 5
At some point in our lives, we all struggle with memory — learning a new name, remembering that book you were reading just yesterday or that word on the tip of your tongue. So what can neuroscience teach us about why we remember, why we forget, and how we might even improve our memories? To answer this question, I spoke with neuroscientist Anthony Wagner , a memory expert in Stanford's Department of Psychology. Learn More Wagner lab website Recent lab publications Anthony's new book: Brain Scien...
May 16, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Today, we're going to talk about how psychedelics alter our perception of reality and what that says about... reality! Welcome to part two of our conversation with Stanford anesthesiologist and psychedelics researcher Boris Heifets ! Last time , we talked with Boris about the question of why psychedelics help people with mental health disorders. This week, we're going to dive into a different question, which is to explore how psychedelics work in the brain. How are they able to alter something a...
May 09, 2024•24 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Psychedelics are a hot topic in psychiatry today. They’re producing dramatic reversals for patients with severe depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. But scientists still have fundamental questions about why these drugs are so effective. For example, is the "trip" even necessary? Some think it is not and are working to design drugs with similar brain chemistry but no psychoactive effects — “Taking the trip out of the drug.” Others suspect that many of the benefits of psychedelics...
May 02, 2024•30 min•Season 4Ep. 2
This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about the neuroscience of climate change with neuroeconomist Nik Sawe. If you follow the science or the news, you know how big of a risk climate change is. Storms, coastal flooding, heat waves, extinctions, mass migration — the list goes on. But — as you can probably also appreciate — it’s really hard to properly perceive that risk. It’s much easier to focus on today’s emergency, this week’s looming deadline, this quarter’s economic forecast ...
Apr 25, 2024•24 min•Season 4Ep. 1
This week we’re doing something a little different. My good friend Michael Osborne, who produces this show also has his own podcast, called Famous & Gravy – Life Lessons from Dead Celebrities. I recently guest-hosted an episode about one of my all time scientific and writerly heros, Oliver Sacks, which we're releasing for both our audiences. I hope you enjoy! --- We've concluded Season 3 of From Our Neurons to Yours! Stay tuned for more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience in Sea...
Mar 14, 2024•1 hr•Season 3Ep. 7
