Brain Inspired

BI 138 Matthew Larkum: The Dendrite Hypothesis

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Matthew Larkum runs his lab at Humboldt University of Berlin, where his group studies how dendrites contribute to  computations within and across layers of the neocortex. Since the late 1990s, Matthew has continued to uncover key properties of the way pyramidal neurons stretch across layers of the cortex, their dendrites receiving inputs from thos...

BI 137 Brian Butterworth: Can Fish Count?

Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Brian Butterworth is Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychology at University College London. In his book, Can Fish Count?: What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds, he describes the counting and numerical abilities across many different species, suggesting our ability to count is evolutionarily very old (since many diverse s...

BI 136 Michel Bitbol and Alex Gomez-Marin: Phenomenology

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Michel Bitbol is Director of Research at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Alex Gomez-Marin is a neuroscientist running his lab, The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory, at the Instituto de Neurociencias in Alicante. We discuss phenomenology as an alternative perspective on our scientific endeavors. Although we like to believe our ...

BI 135 Elena Galea: The Stars of the Brain

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Brains are often conceived as consisting of neurons and "everything else." As Elena discusses, the "everything else," including glial cells and in particular astrocytes, have largely been ignored in neuroscience. That's partly because the fast action potentials of neurons have been assumed to underlie computations in the brain, and because technol...

BI 134 Mandyam Srinivasan: Bee Flight and Cognition

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Srini is Emeritus Professor at Queensland Brain Institute in Australia. In this episode, he shares his wide range of behavioral experiments elucidating the principles of flight and navigation in insects. We discuss how bees use optic flow signals to determine their speed, distance, proximity to objects, and to gracefully land. These abilities are ...

BI 133 Ken Paller: Lucid Dreaming, Memory, and Sleep

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience Ken discusses the recent work in his lab that allows communication with subjects while they experience lucid dreams. This new paradigm opens many avenues to study the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, sleep, dreams, memory, and learning, and to improve and optimize sleep for cognition. Ken and his team are developing a Lucid Dreaming A...

BI 132 Ila Fiete: A Grid Scaffold for Memory

Announcement: I'm releasing my Neuro-AI course April 10-13, after which it will be closed for some time. Learn more here. Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Ila discusses her theoretical neuroscience work suggesting how our memories are formed within the cognitive maps we use to navigate the world and navigate our thoughts. The main idea is that grid cell networks in the entorhinal cortex internally generate a structured scaffold, which gets sent to the ...

BI 131 Sri Ramaswamy and Jie Mei: Neuromodulation-aware DNNs

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Sri and Mei join me to discuss how including principles of neuromodulation in deep learning networks may improve network performance. It's an ever-present question how much detail to include in models, and we are in the early stages of learning how neuromodulators and their interactions shape biological brain function. But as we continue to learn more, Sri and Mei are interested in building "neuromodulation-aware DNNs". ...

BI 130 Eve Marder: Modulation of Networks

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Eve discusses many of the lessons she has learned studying a small nervous system, the crustacean stomatogastric nervous system (STG). The STG has only about 30 neurons and its connections and neurophysiology are well-understood. Yet Eve's work has shown it functions under a remarkable diversity of conditions, and does so is a remarkable variety of ways. We discuss her work on the STG specifically, and what her work impl...

BI 129 Patryk Laurent: Learning from the Real World

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Patryk and I discuss his wide-ranging background working in both the neuroscience and AI worlds, and his resultant perspective on what's needed to move forward in AI, including some principles of brain processes that are more and less important. We also discuss his own work using some of those principles to help deep learning generalize to better capture how humans behave in and perceive the world. Patryk's homepage. Tw...

BI 128 Hakwan Lau: In Consciousness We Trust

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Hakwan and I discuss many of the topics in his new book, In Consciousness we Trust: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience. Hakwan describes his perceptual reality monitoring theory of consciousness, which suggests consciousness may act as a systems check between our sensory perceptions and higher cognitive functions. We also discuss his latest thoughts on mental quality space and how it relates to perceptual...

BI 127 Tomás Ryan: Memory, Instinct, and Forgetting

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Tomás and I discuss his research and ideas on how memories are encoded (the engram), the role of forgetting, and the overlapping mechanisms of memory and instinct. Tomás uses otpogenetics and other techniques to label and control neurons involved in learning and memory, and has shown that forgotten memories can be restored by stimulating "engram cells" originally associated with the forgotten memory. This line of research...

BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Randy and I discuss his long-standing interest in how the brain stores information to compute. That is, where is the engram, the physical trace of memory in the brain? Modern neuroscience is dominated by the view that memories are stored among synaptic connections in populations of neurons. Randy believes a more reasonable and reliable way to store abstract symbols, like numbers, is to write them into code within individu...

BI 125 Doris Tsao, Tony Zador, Blake Richards: NAISys

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Doris, Tony, and Blake are the organizers for this year's NAISys conference, From Neuroscience to Artificially Intelligent Systems (NAISys), at Cold Spring Harbor. We discuss the conference itself, some history of the neuroscience and AI interface, their current research interests, and a handful of topics around evolution, innateness, development, learning, and the current and future prospects for using neuroscience to in...

BI 124 Peter Robin Hiesinger: The Self-Assembling Brain

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Robin and I discuss many of the ideas in his book The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter. The premise is that our DNA encodes an algorithmic growth process that unfolds information via time and energy, resulting in a connected neural network (our brains!) imbued with vast amounts of information from the "start". This contrasts with modern deep learning networks, which start with minimal initial inform...

BI 123 Irina Rish: Continual Learning

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Irina is a faculty member at MILA-Quebec AI Institute and a professor at Université de Montréal. She has worked from both ends of the neuroscience/AI interface, using AI for neuroscience applications, and using neural principles to help improve AI. We discuss her work on biologically-plausible alternatives to back-propagation, using "auxiliary variables" in addition to the normal connection weight updates. We also discuss...

BI 122 Kohitij Kar: Visual Intelligence

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Ko and I discuss a range of topics around his work to understand our visual intelligence. Ko was a postdoc in James Dicarlo's lab, where he helped develop the convolutional neural network models that have become the standard for explaining core object recognition. He is starting his own lab at York University, where he will continue to expand and refine the models, adding important biological details and incorporating mod...

BI 121 Mac Shine: Systems Neurobiology

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Mac and I discuss his systems level approach to understanding brains, and his theoretical work suggesting important roles for the thalamus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum, shifting the dynamical landscape of brain function within varying behavioral contexts. We also discuss his recent interest in the ascending arousal system and neuromodulators. Mac thinks the neocortex has been the sole focus of too much neuroscience rese...

BI 120 James Fitzgerald, Andrew Saxe, Weinan Sun: Optimizing Memories

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. James, Andrew, and Weinan discuss their recent theory about how the brain might use complementary learning systems to optimize our memories. The idea is that our hippocampus creates our episodic memories for individual events, full of particular details. And through a complementary process, slowly consolidates those memories within our neocortex through mechanisms like hippocampal replay. The new idea in their work sugges...

BI 119 Henry Yin: The Crisis in Neuroscience

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Henry and I discuss why he thinks neuroscience is in a crisis (in the Thomas Kuhn sense of scientific paradigms, crises, and revolutions). Henry thinks our current concept of the brain as an input-output device, with cognition in the middle, is mistaken. He points to the failure of neuroscience to successfully explain behavior despite decades of research. Instead, Henry proposes the brain is one big hierarchical set of co...

BI 118 Johannes Jäger: Beyond Networks

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Johannes (Yogi) is a freelance philosopher, researcher & educator. We discuss many of the topics in his online course, Beyond Networks: The Evolution of Living Systems. The course is focused on the role of agency in evolution, but it covers a vast range of topics: process vs. substance metaphysics, causality, mechanistic dynamic explanation, teleology, the important role of development mediating genotypes, phenotypes, and...

BI 117 Anil Seth: Being You

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Anil and I discuss a range of topics from his book, BEING YOU A New Science of Consciousness. Anil lays out his framework for explaining consciousness, which is embedded in what he calls the "real problem" of consciousness. You know the "hard problem", which was David Chalmers term for our eternal difficulties to explain why we have subjective awareness at all instead of being unfeeling, unexperiencing machine-like organi...

BI 116 Michael W. Cole: Empirical Neural Networks

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Mike and I discuss his modeling approach to study cognition. Many people I have on the podcast use deep neural networks to study brains, where the idea is to train or optimize the model to perform a task, then compare the model properties with brain properties. Mike's approach is different in at least two ways. One, he builds the architecture of his models using connectivity data from fMRI recordings. Two, he doesn't trai...

BI 115 Steve Grossberg: Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Steve and I discuss his book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind.  The book is a huge collection of his models and their predictions and explanations for a wide array of cognitive brain functions. Many of the models spring from his Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) framework, which explains how networks of neurons deal with changing environments while maintaining self-organization and retaining learn...

BI 114 Mark Sprevak and Mazviita Chirimuuta: Computation and the Mind

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Mark and Mazviita discuss the philosophy and science of mind, and how to think about computations with respect to understanding minds. Current approaches to explaining brain function are dominated by computational models and the computer metaphor for brain and mind. But there are alternative ways to think about the relation between computations and brain function, which we explore in the discussion. We also talk about the...

BI 113 David Barack and John Krakauer: Two Views On Cognition

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. David and John discuss some of the concepts from their recent paper Two Views on the Cognitive Brain, in which they argue the recent population-based dynamical systems approach is a promising route to understanding brain activity underpinning higher cognition. We discuss mental representations, the kinds of dynamical objects being used for explanation, and much more, including David's perspectives as a practicing neurosci...

BI ViDA Panel Discussion: Deep RL and Dopamine

BI 112 Ali Mohebi and Ben Engelhard: The Many Faces of Dopamine

BI 112: Ali Mohebi and Ben Engelhard The Many Faces of Dopamine Announcement: Ben has started his new lab and is recruiting grad students. Check out his lab here and apply! Engelhard Lab   Ali and Ben discuss the ever-expanding discoveries about the roles dopamine plays for our cognition. Dopamine is known to play a role in learning – dopamine (DA) neurons fire when our reward expectations aren’t met, and that signal helps adjust our expectation. Roughly, DA corresponds to a rew...

BI NMA 06: Advancing Neuro Deep Learning Panel

BI NMA 05: NLP and Generative Models Panel

BI NMA 05: NLP and Generative Models Panel This is the 5th in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy, the online computational neuroscience summer school. This is the 2nd of 3 in the deep learning series. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences “doing more with fewer parameters: Convnets, RNNs, attention & transformers, generative models (VAEs & GANs). Panelists Brad Wyble. @bradpwyble. Kyunghyun Cho. @kchonyc. He He. @hhexiy. João S...

BI NMA 04: Deep Learning Basics Panel

BI NMA 04: Deep Learning Basics Panel This is the 4th in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy, the online computational neuroscience summer school. This is the first of 3 in the deep learning series. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with some basics in deep learning, including Linear deep learning, Pytorch, multi-layer-perceptrons, optimization, & regularization. Guests Amita Kapoor Lyle Ungar @LyleUngar Surya Ganguli @SuryaG...

BI 111 Kevin Mitchell and Erik Hoel: Agency, Emergence, Consciousness

Erik, Kevin, and I discuss... well a lot of things. Erik's recent novel The Revelations is a story about a group of neuroscientists trying to develop a good theory of consciousness (with a murder mystery plot). Kevin's book Innate - How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are describes the messy process of getting from DNA, traversing epigenetics and development, to our personalities. We talk about both books, then dive deeper into topics like whether brains evolved for moving our b...

BI NMA 03: Stochastic Processes Panel

Panelists: Yael Niv. @yael_niv Konrad Kording @KordingLab. Previous BI episodes: BI 027 Ioana Marinescu & Konrad Kording: Causality in Quasi-Experiments. BI 014 Konrad Kording: Regulators, Mount Up! Sam Gershman. @gershbrain. Previous BI episodes: BI 095 Chris Summerfield and Sam Gershman: Neuro for AI? BI 028 Sam Gershman: Free Energy Principle & Human Machines. Tim Behrens. @behrenstim. Previous BI episodes: BI 035 Tim Behrens: Abstracting & Generalizing Knowledge, & Human ...

BI NMA 02: Dynamical Systems Panel

Panelists: Adrienne Fairhall. @alfairhall. Bing Brunton. @bingbrunton. Kanaka Rajan. @rajankdr. BI 054 Kanaka Rajan: How Do We Switch Behaviors? This is the second in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy, the online computational neuroscience summer school. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with linear systems, real neurons, and dynamic networks. Other panels: First panel, about model fitting, GLMs/machine learning, dimensi...

BI NMA 01: Machine Learning Panel

Panelists: Athena Akrami: @AthenaAkrami. Demba Ba. Gunnar Blohm: @GunnarBlohm. Kunlin Wei. This is the first in a series of panel discussions in collaboration with Neuromatch Academy, the online computational neuroscience summer school. In this episode, the panelists discuss their experiences with model fitting, GLMs/machine learning, dimensionality reduction, and deep learning. Other panels: Second panel, about linear systems, real neurons, and dynamic networks. Third panel, about s...

BI 110 Catherine Stinson and Jessica Thompson: Neuro-AI Explanation

Catherine, Jess, and I use some of the ideas from their recent papers to discuss how different types of explanations in neuroscience and AI could be unified into explanations of intelligence, natural or artificial. Catherine has written about how models are related to the target system they are built to explain. She suggests both the model and the target system should be considered as instantiations of a specific kind of phenomenon, and explanation is a product of relating the model and the ...

BI 109 Mark Bickhard: Interactivism

Mark and I discuss a wide range of topics surrounding his Interactivism framework for explaining cognition. Interactivism stems from Mark's account of representations and how what we represent in our minds is related to the external world - a challenge that has plagued the mind-body problem since the beginning. Basically, representations are anticipated interactions with the world, that can be true (if enacting one helps an organism maintain its thermodynamic relation with the world) or fals...

BI 108 Grace Lindsay: Models of the Mind

Grace's website Twitter: @neurograce. Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain. We talked about Grace's work using convolutional neural networks to study vision and attention way back on episode 11. Grace and I discuss her new book Models of the Mind, about the blossoming and conceptual foundations of the computational approach to study minds and brains. Each chapter of the book focuses on one major topic and provides histor...

BI 107 Steve Fleming: Know Thyself

Steve and I discuss many topics from his new book Know Thyself: The Science of Self-Awareness. The book covers the full range of what we know about metacognition and self-awareness, including how brains might underlie metacognitive behavior, computational models to explain mechanisms of metacognition, how and why self-awareness evolved, which animals beyond humans harbor metacognition and how to test it, its role and potential origins in theory of mind and social interaction, how our metacog...

BI 106 Jacqueline Gottlieb and Robert Wilson: Deep Curiosity

Jackie and Bob discuss their research and thinking about curiosity. Jackie's background is studying decision making and attention, recording neurons in nonhuman primates during eye movement tasks, and she's broadly interested in how we adapt our ongoing behavior. Curiosity is crucial for this, so she recently has focused on behavioral strategies to exercise curiosity, developing tasks that test exploration, information sampling, uncertainty reduction, and intrinsic motivation. Bob's back...

BI 105 Sanjeev Arora: Off the Convex Path

Sanjeev and I discuss some of the progress toward understanding how deep learning works, specially under previous assumptions it wouldn't or shouldn't work as well as it does. Deep learning theory poses a challenge for mathematics, because its methods aren't rooted in mathematical theory and therefore are a "black box" for math to open. We discuss how Sanjeev thinks optimization, the common framework for thinking of how deep nets learn, is the wrong approach. Instead, a promising alternative...

BI 104 John Kounios and David Rosen: Creativity, Expertise, Insight

What is creativity? How do we measure it? How do our brains implement it, and how might AI?Those are some of the questions John, David, and I discuss. The neuroscience of creativity is young, in its "wild west" days still. We talk about a few creativity studies they've performed that distinguish different creative processes with respect to different levels of expertise (in this case, in jazz improvisation), and the underlying brain circuits and activity, including using transcranial direct c...

BI 103 Randal Koene and Ken Hayworth: The Road to Mind Uploading

Randal, Ken, and I discuss a host of topics around the future goal of uploading our minds into non-brain systems, to continue our mental lives and expand our range of experiences. The basic requirement for such a subtrate-independent mind is to implement whole brain emulation. We discuss two basic approaches to whole brain emulation. The "scan and copy" approach proposes we somehow scan the entire structure of our brains (at whatever scale is necessary) and store that scan until some future ...

BI 102 Mark Humphries: What Is It Like To Be A Spike?

Mark and I discuss his book, The Spike: An Epic Journey Through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds. It chronicles how a series of action potentials fire through the brain in a couple seconds of someone's life. Starting with light hitting the retina as a person looks at a cookie, Mark describes how that light gets translated into spikes,  how those spikes get processed in our visual system and eventually transform into motor commands to grab that cookie. Along the way, he describes some of the big idea...

BI 101 Steve Potter: Motivating Brains In and Out of Dishes

Steve and I discuss his book, How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning, which is both a memoir and a guide for teachers and students to optimize the learning experience for intrinsic motivation. Steve taught neuroscience and engineering courses while running his own lab studying the activity of live cultured neural populations (which we discuss at length in his previous episode). He relentlessly tested and tweaked his teaching methods, including constant feedback from the students, to ...

BI 100.6 Special: Do We Have the Right Vocabulary and Concepts?

We made it to the last bit of our 100th episode celebration. These have been super fun for me, and I hope you've enjoyed the collections as well. If you're wondering where the missing 5th part is, I reserved it exclusively for Brain Inspired's magnificent Patreon supporters (thanks guys!!!!). The final question I sent to previous guests: Do we already have the right vocabulary and concepts to explain how brains and minds are related? Why or why not? Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 5:04 - Andrew ...

BI 100.4 Special: What Ideas Are Holding Us Back?

In the 4th installment of our 100th episode celebration, previous guests responded to the question: What ideas, assumptions, or terms do you think is holding back neuroscience/AI, and why? As usual, the responses are varied and wonderful! Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 6:41 - Pieter Roelfsema 7:52 - Grace Lindsay 10:23 - Marcel van Gerven 11:38 - Andrew Saxe 14:05 - Jane Wang 16:50 - Thomas Naselaris 18:14 - Steve Potter 19:18 - Kendrick Kay 22:17 - Blake Richards 27:52 - Jay McClelland 30:13 ...

BI 100.3 Can We Scale Up to AGI with Current Tech?

Part 3 in our 100th episode celebration. Previous guests answered the question: Given the continual surprising progress in AI powered by scaling up parameters and using more compute, while using fairly generic architectures (eg. GPT-3), do you think the current trend of scaling compute can lead to human level AGI? If not, what's missing? It likely won't surprise you that the vast majority answer "No." It also likely won't surprise you, there is differing opinion on what's missing.

BI 100.3 Special: Can We Scale Up to AGI with Current Tech?

Part 3 in our 100th episode celebration. Previous guests answered the question: Given the continual surprising progress in AI powered by scaling up parameters and using more compute, while using fairly generic architectures (eg. GPT-3): Do you think the current trend of scaling compute can lead to human level AGI? If not, what's missing? It likely won't surprise you that the vast majority answer "No." It also likely won't surprise you, there is differing opinion on what's missing. Times...

BI 100.2 What Are the Biggest Challenges and Disagreements?

In this 2nd special 100th episode installment, many previous guests answer the question: What is currently the most important disagreement or challenge in neuroscience and/or AI, and what do you think the right answer or direction is? The variety of answers is itself revealing, and shows how many interesting problems there are to work on.