From Our Neurons to Yours Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, Nicholas Weiler

-- We're re-releasing our conversation with Carla Shatz, one of our favorites from the archive, which comes up all the time on the show in the context of brain plasticity and aging. Enjoy, and see you next time! -NW -- When we're kids, our brains are amazing at learning. We absorb information from the outside world with ease, and we can adapt to anything. But as we age, our brains become a little more fixed. Our brain circuits become a little less flexible. You may have heard of a concep...

Hi everyone — quick programming announcement. As we head into summer, we'll be moving to an every-other-week cadence as we prepare more conversations from the frontiers of neuroscience. I'm very excited about what we're working on for you, so stay tuned!In the meantime, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu with your thoughts, praise, critiques, or just to say hello. That's all for now. See you next time!Send us a text!Thanks for listening! If you're enjoyin...

The powerful new generation of AI tools that has come out over the past few years — DALL-E, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest — have blown away our old ideas about what AI can do and raised questions about what it means for computers to start acting... intelligent?This week, we ask what the rise of these systems might teach us about our own biological intelligence — and vice versa. What does modern neuroscience have to say about how AI could become as flexible, efficient, and resili...

At some point in our lives, we all struggle with memory — learning a new name, remembering that book you were reading just yesterday or that word on the tip of your tongue. So what can neuroscience teach us about why we remember, why we forget, and how we might even improve our memories? To answer this question, I spoke with neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, a memory expert in Stanford's Department of Psychology.Learn MoreWagner lab websiteRecent lab publicationsAnthony's new book: Brain Science...

Today, we're going to talk about how psychedelics alter our perception of reality and what that says about... reality! Welcome to part two of our conversation with Stanford anesthesiologist and psychedelics researcher Boris Heifets! Last time, we talked with Boris about the question of why psychedelics help people with mental health disorders. This week, we're going to dive into a different question, which is to explore how psychedelics work in the brain. How are they able to alter some...

Psychedelics are a hot topic in psychiatry today. They’re producing dramatic reversals for patients with severe depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions. But scientists still have fundamental questions about why these drugs are so effective. For example, is the "trip" even necessary? Some think it is not and are working to design drugs with similar brain chemistry but no psychoactive effects — “Taking the trip out of the drug.” Others suspect that many of the benefits of psy...