BI 170 Ali Mohebi: Starting a Research Lab
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In this episode I have a casual chat with Ali Mohebi about his new faculty position and his plans for the future.
BI 169 Andrea Martin: Neural Dynamics and Language
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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 of language. The aim of the model is to account for the properties of language, like its structure, its compositionality, its infinite expressibility, while adhering to physiological data we can measure from human brains.
BI 168 Frauke Sandig and Eric Black w Alex Gomez-Marin: AWARE: Glimpses of Consciousness
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This is the first in a mini-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 scientific routines. Might this feature of art potentially change our scientific attitudes and perspectives?
BI 167 Panayiota Poirazi: AI Brains Need Dendrites
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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 that dendrites just reach out and collect incoming signals for the all-important neuron cell body to process. Yiota, and people Like Matthew Larkum, with whom I chatted in episode 138, are continuing to demonstrate that dendrites are themselves computationally complex and powerful, doing many varieties of important signal transformation before signals reach the cell body. For example, in 2003, Yiota showed that because of dendrites, a single neuron can act as a two-layer artificial neural network, and since then others have shown single neurons can act as deeper and deeper multi-layer networks. In Yiota’s opinion, an even more important function of dendrites is increased computing efficiency, something evolution favors and something artificial networks need to favor as well moving forward.
BI 166 Nick Enfield: Language vs. Reality
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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 about whether language evolved for each of us thinking our wonderful human thoughts, or for communicating those thoughts between each other. Nick would be on the communication side of that debate, but if by communication we mean simply the transmission of thoughts or information between people – I have a thought, I send it to you in language, and that thought is now in your head – then Nick wouldn’t take either side of that debate. He argues the function language goes beyond the transmission of information, and instead is primarily an evolved solution for social coordination – coordinating our behaviors and attention. When we use language, we’re creating maps in our heads so we can agree on where to go.