Brain Inspired

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Brains 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. In the book Romain breaks down how many of the common metaphors we use don’t withstand scrutiny, and he offers alternative approaches more in line with what we know about how biological entities work. Along those lines, we discuss his ongoing work understanding the cognition of a single celled organism, the paramecium, and what his views might mean for artificial intelligence. This is a long episode, but there's a lot more to be explored in the book, so I recommend you read it. If you're a patreon supporter, I coaxed Romain back on for another 45 minutes to go deeper on his thoughts about how anticipation is the core of cognition, how predictive processing accounts like active inference miss the mark, and a few other topics. Romain's websiteThe Brain, in Theory 0:00 - Intro 4:01 - The Brain, In Theory 7:10 - Influences 13:11 - Process metaphysics 18:39 - Observer vs system perspective 21:24 - Information in the brain? 22:56 - Why this book? 29:52 - Computations in the brain 52:14 - Behavior is not a computation 1:07:20 - Paramecium cognition 1:22:02 - How should neuroscientists proceed? 1:29:09 - Cognition as collective behavior of autonomous cells 1:36:47 - Constraints, causes, and laws 1:52:36 - Hopes for the book to influence the field 1:55:04 - Thoughts about AI 2:02:13 - Computation and goals 2:08:17 - Anticipation vs prediction

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Check out this story: Neural manifolds: Latest buzzword or pathway to understand the brain? Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Juan Gallego runs the Neocybernetics Lab at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal, affiliated with the neuroscience of disease and neuroscience programs, and the centre for restorative neurotechnology. Juan has worked a lot on neural manifolds - the mathematical objects neuroscience is using more and more to describe how big populations of neurons coordinate their activity to do useful things. In fact, he recently gave a short talk that he titled The Manifold Manifesto, because he was asked to be provocative. And he was provocative, suggesting that manifolds are real - as real as chairs and tables are, that they have causal power, and they might be a target of evolution. Of course he talked about his own and others work to support those claims. So today we discuss many of those themes, through the lens of his own and others work, and we talk about what keeps him up at night about the possible limits of using manifolds to connect brain activity with behavior and mental phenomena. He's not just a manifold person, though. Juan is more broadly interested in motor control and how brains do it. We also discuss his work in patients with spinal cord injuries, who don't have enough nerve connections to their muscles to actually move, but have enough nerve connections that some signal gets through. Juan and his colleagues can detect that little bit getting through, and use it to infer what behaviors the patients intend to do, and they can use that information to control actions in a computer simulation. The hope is that this will translate to controlling prosthetics to give spinal cord injury patients their mobility again. Neocybernetics Lab@juangallego.bsky.socialA neural manifold view of the brainA neural implementation model of feedback-based motor learningConjoint specification of action by neocortex and striatumIntegrating across behaviors and timescales to understand the neural control of movementEvolutionarily conserved neural dynamics across mice, monkeys, and humans 0:00 - Intro 4:37 - Manifolds 14:30 - Strengths and weaknesses 24:32 - Conserved manifolds across animals and species 34:31 - Causality and manifolds 47:29 - Constraints and causes 51:05 - What to measure 58:55 - Complexity and manifolds 1:10:29 - Juan's background 1:14:08 - Prosthetics for spinal cord injuries 1:41:06 - Integrating across behaviors and timescales 1:46:56 - Conjoint specification of action by neocortex and striatum.

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Tom Griffiths directs both the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence at Princeton University. He's been on brain inspired before to talk about his previous book Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, which he co-wrote with Brian Christian. Today he's here to talk about his new book, The Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the Mind. In this book, Tom explains how the three pillars of logic, neural networks, and probability theory complement each other to explain cognition, arguing we are on the doorstep to settling what mathematical principles - the so-called "laws of thought" - underly our cognition. So we discuss a little bit about a lot of things, including the concepts themselves, the people who have generated and worked on those concepts. I should also mentioned, Tom recorded a bunch of his interviews with people he writes about, and he's edited and polished those into a podcast called the Cognition Project, which I have enjoyed after reading the book, and I think you'd enjoy it either before or after you read the book. Computational Cognitive Science LabPrinceton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence@cocosci_lab@cocoscilab.bsky.socialThe Laws of Thought: The Quest for a Mathematical Theory of the MindPodcast: The Cognition Project 0:00 - Intro 3:20 - Tom's approach 7:19 - 3 pillars of the laws of thought 28:24 - Logic and formal systems strip away meaning 39:04 - Nature of thought 50:35 - Kahneman and Tversky 1:015:12 - Enabling constraints and inductive bias 1:12:51 - Hidden layers, probability, and hidden markov models 1:20:47 - Conscious vs nonconscious 1:23:43 - Feelings 1:31:26 - Personal

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. How does brain activity explain your perceptions and your actions? That's what neuroscientists ask. How does the interaction between brain, body, and environment explain your perceptions and actions? That's what ecological psychologists ask… sometimes leaving the brain out of the equation altogether. These different approaches to perception and action come with different terms, concepts, underlying assumptions, and targets of explanations. So what happens when neuroscientists are inspired by ecological psychology but don't necessarily want take on, or are ignorant of, the fundamental principles underlying ecological psychology? This happens all the time, like how AI was "inspired" by the most rudimentary understanding of how brains work, and took terms from neuroscience like neuron, neural network, and so on, as stand-ins for their models. This has in some sense re-defined what people mean by neuron, and neural network, and how they function and how we should think of them. Modern neuroscience, with better data collecting tools, has taken a turn toward more naturalistic experimental paradigms to study how brains operate in more ecologically valid situations than what has mostly been used in the history of neuroscience - highly controlled tasks and experimental setups that arguably have very little to do with how organisms evolved to interact with the world to do cognitive things. One problem with this turn is that we neuroscientists don't have ready-made theoretical tools to deal with the less constrained massive amounts of data the new approach affords. This has led some neuroscientists to seek those theoretical concepts elsewhere. One of those places that offers those theoretical tools is ecological psychology, developed by James and Eleanor Gibson in the mid-20th century, and continued since then by many adherents of the concepts introduced by ecological psychology. Those concepts are very specific with regard to how and what to explain regarding perception and action. Matthieu de Wit is an associate professor at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, who runst the ECON Lab, as in Ecological Neuroscience. Luis Favela is an associate professor at Indiana University. He's been on before to talk about his book The Ecological Brain. And Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, and he's been on before to talk about ecological psychology and neuroscience. With their deep expertise in ecological psychology, they are keenly interested in how neuroscience write large adopts various facets of ecological psychology. Do neuroscientists have it right? Do they need to have it right? Is there something being lost in translation? How should neuroscientists adopt ecological psychology for an ecological neuroscience? That's what we're discussing today. More broadly, this is also a story about what it's like doing research that isn't part of the current mainstream approach, in this doing ecological psychology under the long shadow cast by the computational mechanistic neuro-centric dominant paradigm in neuroscience currently. de Wit labLuis FavelaThe Ecological Brain: Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and EnvironmentMINT LabEcological psychologyBI 223 Vicente Raja: Ecological Psychology Motifs in NeuroscienceBI 190 Luis Favela: The Ecological BrainBI 213 Representations in Minds and Brains 0:00 - Intro 8:23 - How Louie,...

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Jaan Aru is a co-principal investigator of the Natural and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Tartu in Estonia, where he is an associate professor. Jaan's name has kept popping up on papers I've read over the last few years, sometimes alongside other guests I've had on the podcast, like Matthew Larkum and Mac Shine. With those people and others, he has co-authored papers exploring how some of the pesky biological details of brains might be important for our subjective conscious experience, details like dendritic integration, and loops between the cortex and the thalamus. Turns out a recurring theme in his work is to connect lower-level nitty gritty biological details with higher level cognitive functioning. And he has some thoughts about what that might mean for the prospects of consciousness in artificial systems. And we also touch on his more recent interest in understanding the brain basis of insight and creativity, connecting some of the more mundane kinds of insights during problem solving, for example, with some of the more profound kinds of insights during mystical and psychedelic experiences, for example. Natural & Artificial Intelligence LabThe feasibility of artificial consciousness through the lens of neuroscienceOn biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalismCellular mechanisms of conscious processingRealization experiences: a convergent account of insight and mystical experiences 0:00 - Intro 4:21 - Jaan's approach 8:51 - Likelihood of machine consciousness 18:58 - Across-levels understanding 30:23 - Intelligence vs consciousness 36:27 - Connecting low-level implementation to cognition 45:42 - Organization and constraints 52:28 - Thalamocortical loops 1:04:18 - Artificial consciousness 1:14:34 - Theories of consciousness 1:23:16 - Creativity and insight 1:37:26 - Science research in Estonia

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Michael Shadlen is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University, where he's the principle investigator of the Shadlen Lab. If you study the neural basis of decision making, you already know Shadlen's extensive research, because you are constantly referring to it if you're not already in his lab doing the work. The name Shadlen adorns many many papers relating the behavior and neural activity during decision-making to mathematical models in the drift diffusion family of models. That's not the only work he is known for, As you may have gleaned from those little intro clips, 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. But Mike's account isn't an account of just consciousness. It's an account of nonconscious thought and conscious thought, and how thoughts go from non-conscious to conscious His account is inspired by multiple sources and lines of reasoning. Partly, Shadlen refers to philosophical accounts of cognition by people like Marleau-Ponty and James Gibson, appreciating the embodied and ecological aspects of cognition. And much of his account derives from his own decades of research studying the neural basis of decision-making mostly using perceptual choice tasks where animals make eye movements to report their decisions. So we discuss some of that, including what we continue to learn about neurobiological, neurophysiological, and anatomical details of brains, and the possibility of AI consciousness, given Shadlen's account. Shadlen Lab@shadlenDecision Making as a Model of thought 0:00 - Intro 7:05 - Overview of Mike's account 9:10 - Thought as interrogation 21:03 - Neurons and thoughts 27:05 - Why so many neurons? 36:21 - Evolution of Mike's thinking 39:48 - Marleau-Ponty, cognition, and meaning 44:54 - Naturalistic tasks 51:11 - Consciousness 58:01 - Martin Buber and relational consciousness 1:00:18 - Social and conscious phenomena correlated 1:04:17 - Function vs. nature of consciousness 1:06:05 - Did language evolve because of consciousness? 1:11:11 - Weak phenomenology and long-range feedback 1:22:02 - How does interrogation work in the brain? 1:26:18 - AI consciousness 1:35:49 - The hard problem of consciousness 1:39:34 - Meditation and flow

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Tomaso Poggio is the Eugene McDermott professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and director of both the Center for Biological and Computational Learning at MIT and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines. 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. I first learned of him via his work with David Marr, in which they developed "Marr's levels" of analysis that frame explanation in terms of computation/function, algorithms, and implementation. Since then Tomaso has added "learning" as a crucial fourth level. I will refer to you his autobiography to learn more about the many influential people and projects he has worked with and on, the theorems he and others have proved to discover principles of intelligence, and his broader thoughts and reflections. Right now, he is focused on the principles of compositional sparsity and genericity to explain how deep learning networks can (computationally) efficiently learn useful representations to solve tasks. Lab websiteTomaso's AutobiographyPosition: A Theory of Deep Learning Must Include Compositional SparsityThe Levels of Understanding framework, revisedPoggio lab blogThe Missing Foundations of Intelligence 0:00 - Intro 9:04 - Learning as the fourth level of Marr's levels 12:34 - Engineering then theory (Volta to Maxwell) 19:23 - Does AI need theory? 26:29 - Learning as the door to intelligence 38:30 - Learning in the brain vs backpropagation 40:45 - Compositional sparsity 49:57 - Math vs computer science 56:50 - Generalizability 1:04:41 - Sparse compositionality in brains? 1:07:33 - Theory vs experiment 1:09:46 - Who needs deep learning theory? 1:19:51 - Does theory really help? Patreon 1:28:54 - Outlook

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Alex is an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University where he heads the Maier Lab. His work in neuroscience spans vision, visual perception, and cognition, studying the neurophysiology of cortical columns, and other related topics. Today, he is here to discuss where his focus has shifted over the past few years, the neuroscience of consciousness. I should say shifted back, since that was his original love, which you'll hear about. I've known Alex since my own time at Vanderbilt, where I was a postdoc and he was a new faculty member, and I remember being impressed with him then. I was at a talk he gave - job talk or early talk - where it was immediately obvious how passionate and articulate he is about what he does, and I remember he even showed off some of his telescope photography - good pictures of the moon, I remember. Anyway, we always had fun interactions, even if sometimes it was a quick hello as he ran up stairs and down hallways to get wherever he was going, always in a hurry. Today we discuss why Alex sees integration information theory as the most viable current prospect for explaining consciousness. That is mainly because IIT has developed a formalized mathematical account that hopes to do for consciousness what other math has done for physics, that is, give us what we know as laws of nature. So basically our discussion revolves around everything related to that, like philosophy of science, distinguishing mathematics from "the mathematical", some of the tools he is finding valuable, like category theory, and some of his work measuring the level of consciousness IIT says a whole soccer team has, not just the individuals that comprise the team. Maier LabAstonishing HypothesisSensation and PerceptionLinking the Structure of Neuronal Mechanisms to the Structure of QualiaInformation integration and the latent consciousness of human groupsNeural mechanisms of predictive processing: a collaborative community experiment through the OpenScope program “An Antiphilosophy of Mathematics,” Peter J. FreydDavid Kaiser's playlist on modern physics 0:00 - Intro 4:27 - Discovering consciousness science 11:23 - Laws of perception 15:48 - Integrated information theory and mathematical formalism 23:54 - Theories of consciousness without math 28:18 - Computation metaphor 34:44 - Formalized mathematics is the way 36:56 - Category theory 41:42 - Structuralism 51:09 - The mathematical 54:33 - Metaphysics of the mathematical 59:52 - Yoneda Lemma 1:12:05 - What's real 1:26:22 - Measuring consciousness of a soccer team 1:35:03 - Assumptions and approximations of IIT 1:43:13 - Open science

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Can you look at all the synaptic connections of a brain, and tell me one nontrivial memory from the organism that has that brain? If so, you shall win the $100,000 prize from the Aspirational Neuroscience group. I was recently invited for the second time to chair a panel of experts to discuss that question and all the issues around that question - how to decode a non-trivial memory from a static map of synaptic connectivity. Before I play that recording, let me set the stage a bit more. Aspirational Neuroscience is a community of neuroscientists run by Kenneth Hayworth, with the goal, from their website, to "balance aspirational thinking with respect to the long-term implications of a successful neuroscience with practical realism about our current state of ignorance and knowledge." One of those aspirations is to decoding things - memories, learned behaviors, and so on - from static connectomes. They hold satellite events at the SfN conference, and invite experts in connectomics from academia and from industry to share their thoughts and progress that might advance that goal. In this panel discussion, we touch on multiple relevant topics. One question is what is the right experimental design or designs that would answer whether we are decoding memory - what is a benchmark in various model organisms, and for various theoretical frameworks? We discuss some of the obstacles in the way, both technologically and conceptually. Like the fact that proofreading connectome connections - manually verifying and editing them - is a giant bottleneck, or like the very definition of memory, what counts as a memory, let alone a "nontrivial" memory, and so on. And they take lots of questions from the audience as well. I apologize the audio is not crystal clear in this recording. I did my best to clean it up, and I take full blame for not setting up my audio recorder to capture the best sound. So, if you are a listener, I'd encourage you to check out the video version, which also has subtitles throughout for when the language isn't clear. Anyway, this is a fun and smart group of people, and I look forward to another one next year I hope. The last time I did this was episode 180, BI 180, which I link to in the show notes. Before that I had on Ken Hayworth, whom I mentioned runs Aspirational Neuroscience, and Randal Koene, who is on the panel this time. They were on to talk about the future possibility of uploading minds to computers based on connectomes. That was episode 103. Aspirational NeuroscienceMichał Januszewski@michalwj.bsky.socialSven Dorkenwald@sdorkenw.bsky.socialfirst full Drosophila connectomeHelene Schmidt@helenelab.bsky.socialAndrew Payne@andrewcpayne.bsky.socialE11 BioRandal KoeneCarboncopies FoundationBI 103 Randal Koene and Ken Hayworth: The Road to Mind UploadingBI 180 Panel Discussion: Long-term Memory Encoding and Connectome Decoding

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Tatiana Engel runs the Engel lab at Princeton University in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. She's also part of the International Brain Laboratory, a massive across-lab, across-world, collaboration which you'll hear more about. My main impetus for inviting Tatiana was to talk about two projects she's been working on. One of those is connecting the functional dynamics of cognition with the connectivity of the underlying neural networks on which those dynamics unfold. We know the brain is high-dimensional - it has lots of interacting connections, we know the activity of those networks can often be described by lower-dimensional entities called manifolds, and Tatiana and her lab work to connect those two processes with something they call latent circuits. So you'll hear about that, you'll also hear about how the timescales of neurons across the brain are different but the same, why this is cool and surprising, and we discuss many topics around those main topics. Engel Lab@engeltatiana.bsky.socialInternational Brain LaboratoryLatent circuit inference from heterogeneous neural responses during cognitive tasksThe dynamics and geometry of choice in the premotor cortexA unifying perspective on neural manifolds and circuits for cognitionBrain-wide organization of intrinsic timescales at single-neuron resolutionSingle-unit activations confer inductive biases for emergent circuit solutions to cognitive tasks 0:00 - Intro 3:03 - No central executive 5:01 - International brain lab 15:57 - Tatiana's background 24:49 - Dynamical systems 17:48 - Manifolds 33:10 - Latent task circuits 47:01 - Mixed selectivity 1:00:21 - Internal and external dynamics 1:03:47 - Modern vs classical modeling 1:14:30 - Intrinsic timescales 1:26:05 - Single trial dynamics 1:29:59 - Future of manifolds

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Henk de Regt is a professor of Philosophy of Science and the director of the Institute for Science in Society at Radboud University. Henk wrote the book on Understanding. Literally, he wrote what has become a classic in philosophy of science, Understanding Scientific Understanding. Henks' account of understanding goes roughly like this, but you can learn more in his book and other writings. To claim you understand something in science requires that you can produce a theory-based explanation of whatever you claim to understand, and it depends on you having the right scientific skills to be able to work productively with that theory - for example, making qualitative predictions about it without performing calculations. So understanding is contextual and depends on the skills of the understander. There's more nuance to it, so like I said you should read the book, but this account of understanding distinguishes it from explanation itself, and distinguishes it from other accounts of understanding, which take understanding to be either a personal subjective sense - that feeling of something clicking in your mind - or simply the addition of more facts about something. In this conversation, we revisit Henk's work on understanding, and how it touches on many other topics, like realism, the use of metaphors, how public understanding differs from expert understanding, idealization and abstraction in science, and so on. And, because Henk's kind of understanding doesn't depend on subjective awareness or things being true, he and his cohorts have begun working on whether there could be a benchmark for degrees of understanding, to possibly asses whether AI demonstrates understanding, and to use as a common benchmark for humans and machines. Google Scholar page@henkderegt.bsky.socialUnderstanding Scientific UnderstandingTowards a benchmark for scientific understanding in humans and machinesMetaphors as tools for understanding in science communication among experts and to the publicTwo scientific perspectives on nerve signal propagation: how incompatible approaches jointly promote progress in explanatory understanding 0:00 - Intro 10:13 - Philosophy of explanation vs understanding 14:32 - Different accounts of understanding 20:29 - Henk's account of understanding 26:47 - What counts as intelligible? 34:09 - Hodgkin and Huxley alternative 37:54 - Familiarity vs understanding 44:42 - Measuring understanding 1:02:53 - Machine understanding 1:16:39 - Non-factive understanding 1:23:34 - Abstraction vs understanding 1:31:07 - Public understanding of science 1:41:35 - Reflections on the book

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. My guest today is Dan Nicholson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University, here to talk about his little book, 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. What was he up to, why did he write this "famous little book"? Schrödinger had an agenda, a physics agenda. He wanted to save the older deterministic version of quantum physics from the new indeterministic version. When Dan was on the podcast a few years ago, we talked about the machine view of biological systems, how everything has become a "mechanism", and how that view fails to capture what modern science is actually telling us, that organisms are unlike machines in important ways. That work of Dan's led him down this path to Schrödinger's What Is Life, which he argues was a major contributor to that machine metaphor so ubiquitous today in biology. One of the reasons I'm interested in this kind of work is because the cognitive sciences, including neuroscience and artificial intelligence, inherited this mechanistic perspective, and swallowed it so hard that if you don't include the word "mechanism" in your research paper, you're vastly decreasing your chances of getting your work published, when in fact the mechanistic perspective is one super useful perspective among many. Dan’s websiteGoogle Scholar@NicholsonHPBioWhat Is Life? RevisitedBI 150 Dan Nicholson: Machines, Organisms, Processes 0:00 - Intro 7:27 - Why Schrodinger wrote What is Life 15:13 - Aperiodic crystal and the meaning of code 21:39 - Order-from-order, order-from-disorder 28:32 - Appeal to authority 37:48 - Cell as machine 39:33 - Relation between DNA and organism (development) 44:44 - Negentropy 53:54 - Original contributions 58:54 - Mechanistic metaphor in neuroscience 1:16:05 - What's the lesson? 1:28:06 - Historical sleuthing 1:39:49 - Modern philosophy of biology

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, where he is also part of the Minimal Intelligence Lab run by Paco Cavo, where they study plant behavior, and he is external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. He is a philosopher, and he is a cognitive scientist, and he specializes in applying concepts from ecological psychology to understand how brains, and organisms, including plants, get about in the world. We talk about many facets of his research, both philosophical and scientific, and maybe the best way to describe the conversation is a tour among many of the concepts in ecological psychology - like affordances, ecological information, direct perception, and resonance, and how those concepts do and don't, and should or shouldn’t, contribute to our understanding of brains and minds. We also discuss Vicente's use of the term motif to describe scientific concepts that allow different researches to study roughly the same things even though they have different definitions for those things, and toward the end we touch on his work studying plant behavior. MINT LabEcological psychologyIn search for an alternative to the computer metaphor of the mind and brainEmbodiment and cognitive neuroscience: the forgotten talesThe motifs of radical embodied neuroscienceThe Dynamics of Plant NutationEcological Resonance Is Reflected in Human Brain ActivityAffordances are for life (and not just for maximizing reproductive fitness)Two species of realismBI 152 Michael L. Anderson: After Phrenology: Neural ReuseBI 190 Luis Favela: The Ecological BrainBI 191 Damian Kelty-Stephen: Fractal Turbulent Cascading Intelligence 0:00 - Intro 4:55 - Affordances and neuroscience 13:46 - Motifs 39:41- Reconciling neuroscience and ecological psychology 1:07:55 - Predictive processing 1:15:32 - Resonance 1:23:00 - Biggest holes in ecological psychology 1:29:50 - Plant cognition

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Nikolay Kukushkin is an associate professor at New York University, and a senior scientist at Thomas Carew’s laboratory at the Center for Neural Science. He describes himself as a "molecular philosopher", owing to his day job as a molecular biologist and his broad perspective on how it "hangs together", in the words of Wilfrid Sellers, who in 1962 wrote, “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”. That is what Niko does in his book One Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind. 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. That's very abstract, and we'll spell it out more during the discussion. But as an example at the small scale, the essences of carbon and oxygen, respectively, are creation and destruction, which allows metabolism to occur in biological organisms. Moving way up the scale, following this essence perspective leads Niko to the conclusion that there is no separation between our minds and the world, and that instead we should embrace the relational aspect of mind and world as a unifying principle. On the way, via evolution, we discuss many more examples, plus some of his own work studying how memory works in individual cells, not just neurons or populations of neurons in brains. Niko's website@niko_kukushkinOne Hand Clapping: Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Mind 0:00 - Intro 9:28 - Studying memory in cells 10:14 - Who the book is for 17:57 - Studying memory in cells 21:53 - What is memory? 29:49 - Book 29:52 - How the book came about 37:56 - Central message of the book 44:07 - Meaning in nature 49:09 - Meaning and essence 51:55 - Multicellularity and ant colonies 57:43 - Eukaryotes and complexification 1:03:38 - Why do we have brains? 1:06:17 - Emergence 1:10:58 - Language 1:12:41 - Human evolution 1:14:41 - Artificial intelligence, meaning and essences 1:25:49 - Consciousness

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. Ann Kennedy is Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute and runs the Laboratory for Theoretical Neuroscience and Behavior. Among other things, Ann has been studying how processes important in life, like survival, threat response, motivation, and pain, are mediated through subcortical brain areas like the hypothalamus. She also pays attention to the time course those life processes require, which has led her to consider how the expression of things like proteins help shape neural processes throughout the brain, so we can behave appropriately in those different contexts. You'll hear us talk about how this is still a pretty open field in theoretical neuroscience, unlike the historically heavy use of theory in popular brain areas throughout the cortex, and the historically narrow focus on spikes or action potentials as the only game in town when it comes to neural computation. We discuss that and I link in the show notes to a commentary piece Ann wrote, in which she argues for both top-down and bottom-up theoretical approaches. I also link to her papers about the early evolution of nervous systems, how heterogeneity or diversity of neurons is an advantage for neural computations, and we discuss a kaggle competition she developed to benchmark automated behavioral labels of behaving organisms, so that despite different researchers using different recording systems and setups, analyzing those data will produce consistent labels to better compare across labs and aggregated bigger and better data sets. Laboratory for Theoretical Neuroscience and Behavior@antihebbiann.bsky.social@AntihebbiannKaggle competition Ann developedDynamics of neural activity in early nervous system evolutionTheoretical neuroscience has room to growNeural heterogeneity controls computations in spiking neural networksA parabrachial hub for the prioritization of survival behaviorAn approximate line attractor in the hypothalamus encodes an aggressive state 0:00 - Intro 3:36 - Why study subcortical areas? 13:30 - Evolution 15:06 - Dynamical systems and time scales 21:32 - NeuroAI 28:37 - Before there were brains 33:11 - Endogenous spontaneous activity 40:09 - Natural vs artificial 43:09 - Different is more - heterogeneity 45:32 - Neuromodulators and neuropeptide functions 55:47 - Heterogeneity: manifolds, subspaces, and gain 1:02:43 - Control knobs 1:09:45 - Theoretical neuroscience has room to grow 1:19:59 - Hypothalamus 1:20:57 - Subcortical vs "higher" cognition 1:24:53 - 4E cognition 1:26:56 - Behavior benchmarking 1:37:26 - Current challenges 1:39:46 - Advice to young researchers

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership: https://www.thetransmitter.org/partners/ Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: https://www.thetransmitter.org/newsletters/ To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. 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. Those are the main questions my guests today discuss. Michael Breakspear is a professor of Systems Neuroscience and runs the Systems Neuroscience Group at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Mac Shine is back, he was here a few years ago. Mac runs the Shine Lab at the University of Sidney in Australia. Michael and Mac have been collaborating on the questions I mentioned above, using a systems approach to studying brains and cognition. The short summary of what they discovered in their first collaboration is that turning up or down the gain across broad networks of neurons in the brain affects integration - working together - and segregation - working apart. They map this gain modulation on to the ascending arousal pathway, in which the locus coeruleus projects widely throughout the brain distributing noradrenaline. At a certain sweet spot of gain, integration and segregation are balanced near a bifurcation point, near criticality, which maximizes properties that are good for cognition. In their recent collaboration, they used a coarse graining procedure inspired by physics to study the collective dynamics of various sizes of neural populations, going from single neurons to large populations of neurons. Here they found that despite different coding properties at different scales, there are also scale-free properties that suggest neural populations of all sizes, from single neurons to brains, can do cognitive stuff useful for the organism. And they found this is a conserved property across many different species, suggesting it's a universal principle of brain dynamics in general. So we discuss all that, but to get there we talk about what a systems approach to neuroscience is, how systems neuroscience has changed over the years, and how it has inspired the questions Michael and Mac ask. Systems Neuroscience Group@DrBreakyShine Lab@jmacshineDynamic models of large-scale brain activityMetastable brain wavesThe modulation of neural gain facilitates a transition between functional segregation and integration in the brainMultiscale Organization of Neuronal Activity Unifies Scale-Dependent Theories of Brain FunctionThe brain that controls itselfMetastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising futureGeneration of surrogate brain maps preserving spatial autocorrelation through random rotation of geometric eigenmodesBI 212 John Beggs: Why Brains Seek the Edge of ChaosBI 216 Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen: The Nature of Brain CriticalityBI 121 Mac Shine: Systems Neurobiology 0:00 - Intro 4:28 - Neuroscience vs neurobiology 8:01 - Systems approach 26:52 - Physics for neuroscience 33:15 - Gain and bifurcation: earliest collaboration 55:32 - Multiscale organization 1:17:54 - Roadblocks

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Xaq Pitkow runs the Lab for the Algorithmic Brain at Carnegie Mellon University. The main theme of our discussion is how Xaq approaches his research into cognition by way of principles, from which his questions and models and methods spring forth. We discuss those principles, and In that light, we discuss some of his specific lines of work and ideas on the theoretical side of trying understand and explain a slew of cognitive processes. A few of the specifics we discuss are: LAB: Lab for the Algorithmic BrainHow does the brain compute with probabilities?Rational thoughts in neural codes.Control when confidence is costlyGeneralization of graph network inferences in higher-order graphical modelsAttention when you need 0:00 - Intro 3:57 - Xaq's approach 8:28 - Inverse rational control 19:19 - Space of input-output functions 24:48 - Cognition for cognition 27:35 - Theory vs. experiment 40:32 - How does the brain compute with probabilities? 1:03:57 - Normative vs kludge 1:07:44 - Ecological neuroscience 1:20:47 - Representations 1:29:34 - Current projects 1:36:04 - Need a synaptome 1:42:20 - Across scales

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. 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. I think this is the first time on brain inspired we've discussed stimulating brains to treat mental disorders. I think. Today we talk about Chris's work establishing a biomarker from brain recordings of patients with treatment resistant depression, a specific form of depression. These are patients who have deep brain stimulation electrodes implanted in an effort to treat their depression. Chris and his team used that stimulation in conjunction with brain recordings and machine learning tools to predict how effective the treatment will be under what circumstances, and so on, to help psychiatrists better treat their patients. We'll get into the details and surrounding issues. Toward the end we also talk about Chris's unique background and path and approach, and why he thinks interdisciplinary research is so important. He's one of the most genuinely well intentioned people I've met, and I hope you're inspired by his research and his story. Structured Information for Precision Neuroengineering Lab@crozSciTechCingulate dynamics track depression recovery with deep brain stimulationStory Collider: Wired Lives 0:00 - Intro 3:20 - Overview of the study 17:11 - Closed and open loop stimulation 19:34 - Predicting recovery 28:45 - Control knob for treatment 39:04 - Historical and modern brain stimulation 49:07 - Treatment resistant depression 53:44 - Control nodes complex systems 1:01:06 - Explainable generative AI for a biomarker 1:16:40 - Where are we and what are the obstacles? 1:21:32 - Interface Neuro 1:24:55 - Why Chris cares

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. 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? Is quantum physics part of that story, or a key part, or the key part? Jennifer Prendki believes if we continue to scale AI, it will get us more of the same of what we have today, and that we should look to biology, life, and possibly consciousness to enhance AI. Jennifer is a former particle physicist turned entrepreneur and AI expert, focusing on curating the right kinds and forms of data to train AI, and in that vein she led those efforts at Deepmind on the foundation models ubiquitous in our lives now. I was curious why someone with that background would come to the conclusion that AI needs inspiration from life, biology, and consciousness to move forward gracefully, and that it would be useful to better understand those processes in ourselves before trying to build what some people call AGI, whatever that is. Her perspective is a rarity among her cohorts, which we also discuss. And get this: she's interested in these topics because she cares about what happens to the planet and to us as a species. Perhaps also a rarity among those charging ahead to dominate profits and win the race Quantum of DataThe Myth of EmergenceEmbodiment & Sentience: Why the Body still MattersThe Architecture of Synthetic ConsciousnessOn Time and ConsciousnessSuperalignment and the Question of AI Personhood 0:00 - Intro 3:25 - Jennifer's background 13:10 - Consciousness 16:38 - Life and consciousness 23:16 - Superalignment 40:11 - Quantum 1:04:45 - Wetware and biological mimicry 1:15:03 - Neural interfaces 1:16:48 - AI ethics 1:2:35 - AI models are not models 1:27:13 - What scaling will get us 1:39:53 - Current roadblocks 1:43:19 - Philosophy

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. A few episodes ago, episode 212, I conversed with John Beggs about how criticality might be an important dynamic regime of brain function to optimize our cognition and behavior. Today we continue and extend that exploration with a few other folks in the criticality world. Woodrow Shew is a professor and runs the Shew Lab at the University of Arkansas. Keith Hengen is an associate professor and runs the Hengen Lab at Washington University in St. Louis Missouri. Together, they are Hengen and Shew on a recent review paper in Neuron, titled Is criticality a unified setpoint of brain function? In the review they argue that criticality is a kind of homeostatic goal of neural activity, describing multiple properties and signatures of criticality, they discuss multiple testable predictions of their thesis, and they address the historical and current controversies surrounding criticality in the brain, surveying what Woody thinks is all the past studies on criticality, which is over 300. And they offer a account of why many of these past studies did not find criticality, but looking through a modern lens they most likely would. We discuss some of the topics in their paper, but we also dance around their current thoughts about things like the nature and implications of being nearer and farther from critical dynamics, the relation between criticality and neural manifolds, and a lot more. You get to experience Woody and Keith thinking in real time about these things, which I hope you appreciate. Shew LabHengen LabIs criticality a unified setpoint of brain function? 0:00 - Intro 3:41 - Collaborating 6:22 - Criticality community 14:47 - Tasks vs. Naturalistic 20:50 - Nature of criticality 25:47 - Deviating from criticality 33:45 - Sleep for criticality 38:41 - Neuromodulation for criticality 40:45 - Criticality Definition part 1: scale invariance 43:14 - Criticality Definition part 2: At a boundary 51:56 - New method to assess criticality 56:12 - Types of criticality 1:02:23 - Value of criticality versus other metrics 1:15:21 - Manifolds and criticality 1:26:06 - Current challenges