All Episodes
BI 224 Dan Nicholson: Schrödinger’s What is Life? Revisited
Erwin Schrödinger’s What Is Life is a famous book that people point to as having predicted DNA and influenced and inspired many well-known biologists ushering in the molecular biology revolution. But Schrödinger was a physicist, not a biologist, and he spent very little time and effort toward understanding biology.
BI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in Neuroscience
Raja discusses his philosophical and scientific work assessing how concepts from ecological psychology might elucidate the brain’s role in perception and action, within the context of our inextricable embodiment and interaction with the environment. They also discuss Raja’s term “motif” to describe how a single term can enable scientific progress even when researchers use different definitions for the same words, and the ongoing research studying the nature of plant behavior.
BI 222 Nikolay Kukushkin: Minds and Meaning from Nature’s Ideas
This book is about essences across spatial scales in nature. More precisely, it’s about giving names to what is fundamental, or essential, to how things and processes function in nature. Niko argues those essences are where meaning resides.
BI 221 Ann Kennedy: Theory Beneath the Cortical Surface
Ann Kennedy is Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute and runs the Laboratory for Theoretical Neuroscience and Behavior.
BI 220 Michael Breakspear and Mac Shine: Dynamic Systems from Neurons to Brains
What changes and what stays the same as you scale from single neurons up to local populations of neurons up to whole brains? How tuning parameters like the gain in some neural populations affects the dynamical and computational properties of the rest of the system.
BI 219 Xaq Pitkow: Principles and Constraints of Cognition
Xaq Pitkow shares his principles to study cognition in our imperfect brains and bodies, and how AI and machine learning are contributing to our efforts to understand brains and minds.
BI 218 Chris Rozell: Brain Stimulation and AI for Mental Disorders
We are in an exciting time in the cross-fertilization of the neurotech industry and the cognitive sciences. My guest today is Chris Rozell, who sits in that space that connects neurotech and brain research. Chris runs the Structured Information for Precision Neuroengineering Lab at Georgia Tech University, and he was just named the inaugural director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society.
BI 217 Jennifer Prendki: Consciousness, Life, AI, and Quantum Physics
Do AI engineers need to emulate some processes and features found only in living organisms at the moment, like how brains are inextricably integrated with bodies? Is consciousness necessary for AI entities if we want them to play nice with us?
BI 216 Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen: The Nature of Brain Criticality
Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen on critical brain dynamics and cognition, learning, and development.
BI 215 Xiao-Jing Wang: Theoretical Neuroscience Comes of Age
Xiao-Jing was born and grew up in China, spent 8 years in Belgium studying theoretical physics like nonlinear dynamical systems and deterministic chaos.
BI 214 Nicole Rust: How To Actually Fix Brains and Minds
Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders―and How We Can Change That. Nicole Rust runs the Visual Memory laboratory at UPenn, University of Pennsylvania. Her interests have expanded now to include mood and feelings, as you’ll hear. And she wrote this book, which contains a plethora of ideas about how we can pave a way forward in neuroscience to help treat mental and brain disorders. We talk about a small plethora of those ideas from her book. which also contains the story partially which will hear of her own journey in thinking about these things from working early on in visual neuroscience to where she is now.
BI 213 Representations in Minds and Brains
What do neuroscientists mean when they use the term representation? That’s part of what Luis Favela and Edouard Machery set out to answer a couple years ago by surveying lots of folks in the cognitive sciences, and they concluded that as a field the term is used in a confused and unclear way.
BI 212 John Beggs: Why Brains Seek the Edge of Chaos
You may have heard of the critical brain hypothesis. It goes something like this: brain activity operates near a dynamical regime called criticality, poised at the sweet spot between too much order and too much chaos, and this is a good thing because systems at criticality are optimized for computing, they maximize information transfer, they maximize the time range over which they operate, and a handful of other good properties.
BI 211 COGITATE: Testing Theories of Consciousness
Rony Hirschhorn, Alex Lepauvre, and Oscar Ferrante on testing integrated information and global neuronal workspace theories of consciousness.
BI 210 Dean Buonomano: Consciousness, Time, and Organotypic Dynamics
Dean Buonomano on time in neuroscience vs. physics, integrated information theory, testing timing dynamics in organotypic brain slices, and how AI doesn’t need neuroscience to continue to progress.
BI 209 Aran Nayebi: The NeuroAI Turing Test
Aran Nayebi on NeuroAgents, reverse-engineering brains to build autonomous agents, and an update to the Turing test for NeuroAI.
BI 208 Gabriele Scheler: From Verbal Thought to Neuron Computation
Gabriele Scheler co-founded the Carl Correns Foundation for Mathematical Biology. In fact, Carl Correns was her great grandfather, one of the early pioneers in genetics. Gabriele is a computational neuroscientist, whose goal is to build models of cellular computation, and much of her focus is on neurons.
BI 207 Alison Preston: Schemas in our Brains and Minds
Ali Preston on how the neuroscience of schemas, which help us form memories, integrate and differentiate information, and make predictions.