Code of the Mind

Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Social Sciences

How do you model a brain? Not all of it — just one piece. A synapse that strengthens with use. A neuron in the visual cortex that responds to edges. A cerebellum learning to fine-tune movement. A dopamine signal that encodes not reward itself, but the surprise of it. Code of the Mind is a podcast about the moments when neuroscientists and mathematicians found a shared language. Each episode takes one discovery or one thinker and follows the idea all the way through — where it came from, what it explained, and what it opened up.

Episodes

  1. 2d ago

    Fire Together, Wire Together

    In 1949, a Canadian psychologist with no patience for the strict behaviorism of his day proposed a rule for how connections between neurons change with experience — and used it to imagine how thought could emerge from cell assemblies firing in loops. That idea became "neurons that fire together, wire together," now one of neuroscience's most repeated phrases, even though Donald Hebb himself never wrote it quite that way. This episode follows Hebb from a childhood in Nova Scotia, through failed ambitions as a novelist, into a career that helped found a whole way of thinking about the mind — one whose fingerprints are now all over modern learning algorithms.

  2. Jun 29

    The Prediction Machine

    Dopamine has long been called the brain's pleasure chemical — the one that surges when you eat sugar or scroll through your phone. That story turns out to be mostly wrong. What dopamine neurons are actually doing is more surprising, and more mathematical. This episode traces how that discovery came together — through a neurophysiologist recording from monkey brains and a pair of computational neuroscientists who had been reading about reinforcement learning. It ends with how the same math is being used to understand depression and addiction.

  3. Vehicles for Thought

    Jun 29

    Vehicles for Thought

    Valentino Braitenberg spent decades studying how the brain is wired, convinced that anatomy, looked at carefully enough, reveals function. But he is best remembered for a slim 1984 book about imaginary robots that seemed to feel fear, show aggression, fall in love. This episode takes us into his world — a life that spanned continents, and a mind that refused to stay in one discipline.

    14 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

How do you model a brain? Not all of it — just one piece. A synapse that strengthens with use. A neuron in the visual cortex that responds to edges. A cerebellum learning to fine-tune movement. A dopamine signal that encodes not reward itself, but the surprise of it. Code of the Mind is a podcast about the moments when neuroscientists and mathematicians found a shared language. Each episode takes one discovery or one thinker and follows the idea all the way through — where it came from, what it explained, and what it opened up.

Information

  • Creator
    Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    3
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
  • Show Website
    Code of the Mind