All Episodes
BI 245 Dan Levenstein: Neuro-AI, Dynamics, and Model Systems
Daniel Levenstein explains how internally generated brain activity during sleep shapes our cognition, and why Neuro-AI is such a powerful approach to understand our brains.
BI 244 Marco Facchin: Philosophy and Science of Biological Brains
Marco Facchin on alternatives to computationalism in neuroscience, and philosophy of cognitive science.
BI 243 Alison Barth: Learning as a Window to Cortex
Alison Barth discovers how different neuron types contribute to cortical function.
BI 242 Kathryn Nave: How Life Gets its Meaning and Intelligence
Kathryn Nave explains how a concept called constraint closure may be fundamental for how to understand brains, minds, and cognition.
BI 241 Johannes Jaeger: Agency and the Cyborg Myth
From single cells to whole organisms, living beings must continuously regenerate themselves and judge what’s important to continue living. AI does not and cannot.
BI 240 Cristopher Moore: Cognition and Computational Complexity
Cristopher Moore on whether computational complexity is relevant for understanding brains, minds, and intelligence.
BI 239 Nedah Nemati: Naturalistic Neuroscience and Lived Experience
Nedah Nemati explains how neuroscience methods and the lived experience of the scientists themselves shape how we define the behaviors we seek to explain.
BI 238 James Harrison: Hypnosis as Mental Foraging
James Harrison discusses how modern neuroscience explains clinical hypnosis, making the case to bring hypnosis from a misunderstood fringe practice to an accepted psychiatric treatment.
BI 237 Ehud Ahissar: Consciousness and Perceptual Dualism
Ehud Ahissar is a professor in the Department of Brain Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Years of studying how rodents actively sense their environment through whisking has led Ahissar to propose a dualistic framework for consciousness. He suggests we communicate with others (and ourselves) through a non-physical digital process, while we experience the world through a physical analog process. These two processing modes map onto complementary opposing hierarchical loops of brain circuitry.
BI 236 Liset de la Prida: Neurons, Ripples, and Manifolds
Liset de la Prida on how neuronal subtypes influence population manifolds and the varieties of sharp wave ripples in the brain.
BI 235 Romain Brette: The Brain, in Theory
rains encode information in representations that perform computations to make predictions, right? No, no, no, and no. That’s Romain Brette’s response to those ill-conceived notions that neuroscience relies on to try to explain how cognition works. He uses more words to do that in his new book, The Brain, in Theory, which we discuss today.
BI 234 Juan Gallego: The Neural Manifold Manifesto
Should we think of our brains as collections of neural population manifolds? Gallego suggests a wealth of evidence supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem.
BI 233 Tom Griffiths: The Laws of Thought
Tom Griffiths on how neural networks, logic, and probability theory weave together to explain cognition.
BI 232 How Should Neuroscience Integrate with Ecological Psychology?
Three ecological psychologists on the right and wrong ways to use ecological psychology principles in neuroscience.
Luis Favela, Vicente Raja, and Mattheu de Wit weigh in on the recent trend of neuroscientists importing concepts from ecological psychology, and how assumptions in neuroscience may gloss over critical principles underlying ecological psychology.
BI 231 Jaan Aru: Conscious AI? Not Even Close!
Jaan Aru on why AI is nowhere near having consciousness, and how neuroscience might enlighten how consciousness comes about.
BI 230 Michael Shadlen: How Thoughts Become Conscious
Michael is with me today to discuss his account of what makes a thought conscious, in the hopes to inspire neuroscience research to eventually tackle the hard problem of consciousness – why and how we have subjective experience.
BI 229 Tomaso Poggio: Principles of Intelligence and Learning
Tomaso believes we are in-between building and understanding useful AI That is, we are in between engineering and theory. He likens this stage to the period after Volta invented the battery and Maxwell developed the equations of electromagnetism. Tomaso has worked for decades on the theory and principles behind intelligence and learning in brains and machines.
BI 228 Alex Maier: Laws of Consciousness
Alex Maier on why consciousness science needs mathematical formalization – in particular, a structuralist approach like that in integrated information theory