Brain Inspired

Paul Middlebrooks
  • 0.0 (0)
  • NATURAL SCIENCES
  • MONTHLY
Brain Inspired

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    BI 199 Hessam Akhlaghpour: Natural Universal Computation

    Support the show to get full episodes 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. Hessam Akhlaghpour is a postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University in the Maimon lab. His experimental work is in fly neuroscience mostly studying spatial memories in fruit flies. However, we are going to be talking about a different (although somewhat related) side of his postdoctoral research. This aspect of his work involves theoretical explorations of molecular computation, which are deeply inspired by Randy Gallistel and Adam King's book Memory and the Computational Brain. Randy has been on the podcast before to discuss his ideas that memory needs to be stored in something more stable than the synapses between neurons, and how that something could be genetic material like RNA. When Hessam read this book, he was re-inspired to think of the brain the way he used to think of it before experimental neuroscience challenged his views. It re-inspired him to think of the brain as a computational system. But it also led to what we discuss today, the idea that RNA has the capacity for universal computation, and Hessam's development of how that might happen. So we discuss that background and story, why universal computation has been discovered in organisms yet since surely evolution has stumbled upon it, and how RNA might and combinatory logic could implement universal computation in nature. Hessam's website. Maimon Lab. Twitter: @theHessam. Related papers An RNA-based theory of natural universal computation. The molecular memory code and synaptic plasticity: a synthesis. Lifelong persistence of nuclear RNAs in the mouse brain. Cris Moore's conjecture #5 in this 1998 paper. (The Gallistel book): Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science Will Transform Neuroscience. Related episodes BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram? BI 172 David Glanzman: Memory All The Way Down Read the transcript. 0:00 - Intro 4:44 - Hessam's background 11:50 - Randy Gallistel's book 14:43 - Information in the brain 17:51 - Hessam's turn to universal computation 35:30 - AI and universal computation 40:09 - Universal computation to solve intelligence 44:22 - Connecting sub and super molecular 50:10 - Junk DNA 56:42 - Genetic material for coding 1:06:37 - RNA and combinatory logic 1:35:14 - Outlook 1:42:11 - Reflecting on the molecular world

    1h 49m

  2. 11 NOV

    BI 198 Tony Zador: Neuroscience Principles to Improve AI

    Support the show to get full episodes 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 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. Tony Zador runs the Zador lab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. You've heard him on Brain Inspired a few times in the past, most recently in a panel discussion I moderated at this past COSYNE conference - a conference Tony co-founded 20 years ago. As you'll hear, Tony's current and past interests and research endeavors are of a wide variety, but today we focus mostly on his thoughts on NeuroAI. We're in a huge AI hype cycle right now, for good reason, and there's a lot of talk in the neuroscience world about whether neuroscience has anything of value to provide AI engineers - and how much value, if any, neuroscience has provided in the past. Tony is team neuroscience. You'll hear him discuss why in this episode, especially when it comes to ways in which development and evolution might inspire better data efficiency, looking to animals in general to understand how they coordinate numerous objective functions to achieve their intelligent behaviors - something Tony calls alignment - and using spikes in AI models to increase energy efficiency. Zador Lab Twitter: @TonyZador Previous episodes: BI 187: COSYNE 2024 Neuro-AI Panel. BI 125 Doris Tsao, Tony Zador, Blake Richards: NAISys BI 034 Tony Zador: How DNA and Evolution Can Inform AI Related papers Catalyzing next-generation Artificial Intelligence through NeuroAI. Encoding innate ability through a genomic bottleneck. Essays NeuroAI: A field born from the symbiosis between neuroscience, AI. What the brain can teach artificial neural networks. Read the transcript. 0:00 - Intro 3:28 - "Neuro-AI" 12:48 - Visual cognition history 18:24 - Information theory in neuroscience 20:47 - Necessary steps for progress 24:34 - Neuro-AI models and cognition 35:47 - Animals for inspiring AI 41:48 - What we want AI to do 46:01 - Development and AI 59:03 - Robots 1:25:10 - Catalyzing the next generation of AI

    1h 35m

  3. 25 OCT

    BI 197 Karen Adolph: How Babies Learn to Move and Think

    Support the show to get full episodes 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 the “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. Karen Adolph runs the Infant Action Lab at NYU, where she studies how our motor behaviors develop from infancy onward. We discuss how observing babies at different stages of development illuminates how movement and cognition develop in humans, how variability and embodiment are key to that development, and the importance of studying behavior in real-world settings as opposed to restricted laboratory settings. We also explore how these principles and simulations can inspire advances in intelligent robots. Karen has a long-standing interest in ecological psychology, and she shares some stories of her time studying under Eleanor Gibson and other mentors. Finally, we get a surprise visit from her partner Mark Blumberg, with whom she co-authored an opinion piece arguing that "motor cortex" doesn't start off with a motor function, oddly enough, but instead processes sensory information during the first period of animals' lives. Infant Action Lab (Karen Adolph's lab) Sleep and Behavioral Development Lab (Mark Blumberg's lab) Related papers Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated, and Enabling An Ecological Approach to Learning in (Not and) Development An update of the development of motor behavior Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition Read the transcript.

    1h 30m

  4. 11 OCT

    BI 196 Cristina Savin and Tim Vogels with Gaute Einevoll and Mikkel Lepperød

    Support the show to get full episodes 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.  This is the second conversation I had while teamed up with Gaute Einevoll at a workshop on NeuroAI in Norway. In this episode, Gaute and I are joined by Cristina Savin and Tim Vogels. Cristina shares how her lab uses recurrent neural networks to study learning, while Tim talks about his long-standing research on synaptic plasticity and how AI tools are now helping to explore the vast space of possible plasticity rules. We touch on how deep learning has changed the landscape, enhancing our research but also creating challenges with the "fashion-driven" nature of science today. We also reflect on how these new tools have changed the way we think about brain function without fundamentally altering the structure of our questions. Be sure to check out Gaute's Theoretical Neuroscience podcast as well! Mikkel Lepperød Cristina Savin Tim Vogels Twitter: @TPVogels Gaute Einevoll Twitter: @GauteEinevoll Gaute's Theoretical Neuroscience podcast. Validating models: How would success in NeuroAI look like? Read the transcript, provided by The Transmitter.

    1h 20m

  5. 8 OCT

    BI 195 Ken Harris and Andreas Tolias with Gaute Einevoll and Mikkel Lepperød

    Support the show to get full episodes 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. This is the first of two less usual episodes. I was recently in Norway at a NeuroAI workshop called Validating models: How would success in NeuroAI look like? What follows are a few recordings I made with my friend Gaute Einevoll. Gaute has been on this podcast before, but more importantly he started his own podcast a while back called Theoretical Neuroscience, which you should check out. Gaute and I introduce the episode, then briefly speak with Mikkel Lepperød, one of the organizers of the workshop. In this first episode, we're then joined by Ken Harris and Andreas Tolias to discuss how AI has influenced their research, thoughts about brains and minds, and progress and productivity. Validating models: How would success in NeuroAI look like? Mikkel Lepperød Andreas Tolias Twitter: @AToliasLab Ken Harris Twitter: @kennethd_harris Gaute Einevoll Twitter: @GauteEinevoll Gaute's Theoretical Neuroscience podcast. Read the transcript, provided by The Transmitter.

    1h 17m

  6. 27 SEPT

    BI 194 Vijay Namboodiri & Ali Mohebi: Dopamine Keeps Getting More Interesting

    Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. https://youtu.be/lbKEOdbeqHo 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.  The Transmitter has provided a transcript for this episode. Vijay Namoodiri runs the Nam Lab at the University of California San Francisco, and Ali Mojebi is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ali as been on the podcast before a few times, and he's interested in how neuromodulators like dopamine affect our cognition. And it was Ali who pointed me to Vijay, because of some recent work Vijay has done reassessing how dopamine might function differently than what has become the classic story of dopamine's function as it pertains to learning. The classic story is that dopamine is related to reward prediction errors. That is, dopamine is modulated when you expect reward and don't get it, and/or when you don't expect reward but do get it. Vijay calls this a "prospective" account of dopamine function, since it requires an animal to look into the future to expect a reward. Vijay has shown, however, that a retrospective account of dopamine might better explain lots of know behavioral data. This retrospective account links dopamine to how we understand causes and effects in our ongoing behavior. So in this episode, Vijay gives us a history lesson about dopamine, his newer story and why it has caused a bit of controversy, and how all of this came to be. I happened to be looking at the Transmitter the other day, after I recorded this episode, and low and behold, there was an article titles Reconstructing dopamine’s link to reward. Vijay is featured in the article among a handful of other thoughtful researchers who share their work and ideas about this very topic. Vijay wrote his own piece as well: Dopamine and the need for alternative theories. So check out those articles for more views on how the field is reconsidering how dopamine works. Nam Lab. Mohebi & Associates (Ali's Lab). Twitter: @vijay_mkn @mohebial Transmitter Dopamine and the need for alternative theories. Reconstructing dopamine’s link to reward. Related papers Mesolimbic dopamine release conveys causal associations. Mesostriatal dopamine is sensitive to changes in specific cue-reward contingencies. What is the state space of the world for real animals? The learning of prospective and retrospective cognitive maps within neural circuits Further reading (Ali's paper): Dopamine transients follow a striatal gradient of reward time horizons. Ali listed a bunch of work on local modulation of DA release: Local control of striatal dopamine release. Synaptic-like axo-axonal transmission from striatal cholinergic interneurons onto dopaminergic fibers. Spatial and temporal scales of dopamine transmission. Striatal dopamine neurotransmission: Regulation of release and uptake. Striatal Dopamine Release Is Triggered by Synchronized Activity in Cholinergic Interneurons. An action potential initiation mechanism in distal axons for the control of dopamine release. Read the transcript, produced by The Transmitter. 0:00 - Intro 3:42 - Dopamine: the history of theories 32:54 - Importance of learning and behavior studies 39:12 - Dopamine and causality 1:06:45 - Controversy over Vijay's findings

    1h 37m

  7. 11 SEPT

    BI 193 Kim Stachenfeld: Enhancing Neuroscience and AI

    Support the show to get full episodes 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:  Monkeys build mental maps to navigate new tasks 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. Kim Stachenfeld embodies the original core focus of this podcast, the exploration of the intersection between neuroscience and AI, now commonly known as Neuro-AI. That's because she walks both lines. Kim is a Senior Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, the AI company that sprang from neuroscience principles, and also does research at the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University. She's been using her expertise in modeling, and reinforcement learning, and cognitive maps, for example, to help understand brains and to help improve AI. I've been wanting to have her on for a long time to get her broad perspective on AI and neuroscience. We discuss the relative roles of industry and academia in pursuing various objectives related to understanding and building cognitive entities She's studied the hippocampus in her research on reinforcement learning and cognitive maps, so we discuss what the heck the hippocampus does since it seems to implicated in so many functions, and how she thinks of reinforcement learning these days. Most recently Kim at Deepmind has focused on more practical engineering questions, using deep learning models to predict things like chaotic turbulent flows, and even to help design things like bridges and airplanes. And we don't get into the specifics of that work, but, given that I just spoke with Damian Kelty-Stephen, who thinks of brains partially as turbulent cascades, Kim and I discuss how her work on modeling turbulence has shaped her thoughts about brains. Kim's website. Twitter: @neuro_kim. Related papers Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models. Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models. Learned simulators: Learned coarse models for efficient turbulence simulation. Physical design using differentiable learned simulators. Check out the transcript, provided by The Transmitter. 0:00 - Intro 4:31 - Deepmind's original and current vision 9:53 - AI as tools and models 12:53 - Has AI hindered neuroscience? 17:05 - Deepmind vs academic work balance 20:47 - Is industry better suited to understand brains? 24?42 - Trajectory of Deepmind 27:41 - Kim's trajectory 33:35 - Is the brain a ML entity? 36:12 - Hippocampus 44:12 - Reinforcement learning 51:32 - What does neuroscience need more and less of? 1:02:53 - Neuroscience in a weird place? 1:06:41 - How Kim's questions have changed 1:16:31 - Intelligence and LLMs 1:25:34 - Challenges

    1h 33m

  8. 28 AUG

    BI 192 Àlex Gómez-Marín: The Edges of Consciousness

    Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Àlex Gómez-Marín heads The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain. He's one of those theoretical physicist turned neuroscientist, and he has studied a wide range of topics over his career. Most recently, he has become interested in what he calls the "edges of consciousness", which encompasses the many trying to explain what may be happening when we have experiences outside our normal everyday experiences. For example, when we are under the influence of hallucinogens, when have near-death experiences (as Alex has), paranormal experiences, and so on. So we discuss what led up to his interests in these edges of consciousness, how he now thinks about consciousness and doing science in general, how important it is to make room for all possible explanations of phenomena, and to leave our metaphysics open all the while. Alex's website: The Behavior of Organisms Laboratory. Twitter: @behaviOrganisms. Previous episodes: BI 168 Frauke Sandig and Eric Black w Alex Gomez-Marin: AWARE: Glimpses of Consciousness. BI 136 Michel Bitbol and Alex Gomez-Marin: Phenomenology. Related: The Consciousness of Neuroscience. Seeing the consciousness forest for the trees. The stairway to transhumanist heaven. 0:00 - Intro 4:13 - Evolving viewpoints 10:05 - Near-death experience 18:30 - Mechanistic neuroscience vs. the rest 22:46 - Are you doing science? 33:46 - Where is my. mind? 44:55 - Productive vs. permissive brain 59:30 - Panpsychism 1:07:58 - Materialism 1:10:38 - How to choose what to do 1:16:54 - Fruit flies 1:19:52 - AI and the Singularity

    1h 31m
See All (163)

About

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.

Information

  • Creator
    Paul Middlebrooks
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2024
  • Episodes
    163
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2019 Brain-Inspired
  • Show Website
    Brain Inspired

You Might Also Like

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign in or sign up to follow shows, save episodes and get the latest updates.
Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada