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 Ellie Pavlick runs her Language Understanding and Representation Lab at Brown University, where she studies lots of topics related to language. In AI, large language models, sometimes called foundation models, are all the rage these days, with their ability to generate convincing language, although they still make plenty of...

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 Earl Miller runs the Miller Lab at MIT, where he studies how our brains carry out our executive functions, like working memory, attention, and decision-making. In particular he is interested in the role of the prefrontal cortex and how it coordinates with other brain areas to carry out these functions. During this episode, we talk...

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 Hugo Spiers runs the Spiers Lab at University College London. In general Hugo is interested in understanding spatial cognition, like navigation, in relation to other processes like planning and goal-related behavior, and how brain areas like the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex coordinate these cognitive functions. So, in this...

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 Ole Jensen is co-director of the Centre for Human Brain Health at University of Birmingham, where he runs his Neuronal Oscillations Group lab. Ole is interested in how the oscillations in our brains affect our cognition by helping to shape the spiking patterns of neurons, and by helping to allocate resources to parts of our brains...

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 Chris Summerfield runs the Human Information Processing Lab at University of Oxford, and he's a research scientist at Deepmind. You may remember him from episode 95 with Sam Gershman, when we discussed ideas around the usefulness of neuroscience and psychology for AI. Since then, Chris has released his book, Natural General...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Paul Rosenbloom is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. In the early 1980s, Paul , along with John Laird and the early AI pioneer Alan Newell, developed one the earliest and best know cognitive architectures called SOAR. A cognitive architecture, as Paul defines it, is a model of the fixed structures and processes underlying minds, and in Paul's case the human mind. And...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Sarah Robins is a philosopher at the University of Kansas, one a growing handful of philosophers specializing in memory. Much of her work focuses on memory traces, which is roughly the idea that somehow our memories leave a trace in our minds. We discuss memory traces themselves and how they relate to the engram (see BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?, and BI 127 Tomás Ryan: Memory, Instinct, and...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Mariam Aly runs the Aly lab at Columbia University, where she studies the interaction of memory, attention, and perception in brain regions like the hippocampus. The short story is that memory affects our perceptions, attention affects our memories, memories affect our attention, and these effects have signatures in neural activity measurements in our hippocampus and other brain areas. We discuss her experiments...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Luiz Pessoa runs his Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he studies how emotion and cognition interact. On this episode, we discuss many of the topics from his latest book, The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together, which is aimed at a general audience. The book argues we need to re-think how to study the brain....

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Anne Collins runs her  Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Berkley One of the things she's been working on for years is how our working memory plays a role in learning as well, and specifically how working memory and reinforcement learning interact to affect how we learn, depending on the nature of what we're trying to learn. We discuss that interaction specifically. We also...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Carolyn Dicey Jennings is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist at University of California, Merced. In her book The Attending Mind, she lays out an attempt to unify the concept of attention. Carolyn defines attention roughly as the mental prioritization of some stuff over other stuff based on our collective interests. And one of her main claims is that attention is evidence of a real, emergent self or subject,...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Michael L. Anderson is a professor at the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, at Western University. His book, After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain, calls for a re-conceptualization of how we understand and study brains and minds. Neural reuse is the phenomenon that any given brain area is active for multiple cognitive functions, and partners with different sets of brain areas to carry out different...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Steve Byrnes is a physicist turned AGI safety researcher. He's concerned that when we create AGI, whenever and however that might happen, we run the risk of creating it in a less than perfectly safe way. AGI safety (AGI not doing something bad) is a wide net that encompasses AGI alignment (AGI doing what we want it to do). We discuss a host of ideas Steve writes about in his Intro to Brain-Like-AGI Safety blog...

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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 Dan Nicholson is a philosopher at George Mason University. He incorporates the history of science and philosophy into modern analyses of our conceptions of processes related to life and organisms. He is also interested in re-orienting our conception of the universe as made fundamentally of things/substances, and replacing it with the...

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. William B. Miller is an ex-physician turned evolutionary biologist. In this episode, we discuss topics related to his new book, Bioverse: How the Cellular World Contains the Secrets to Life's Biggest Questions. The premise of the book is that all individual cells are intelligent in their own right, and possess a sense of self. From...

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. Gaute Einevoll is a professor at the University of Oslo and Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Use develops detailed models of brain networks to use as simulations, so neuroscientists can test their various theories and hypotheses about how networks implement various functions. Thus, the models are tools. The goal is to create...

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. Noah Hutton writes, directs, and scores documentary and narrative films. On this episode, we discuss his documentary In Silico. In 2009, Noah watched a TED talk by Henry Markram, in which Henry claimed it would take 10 years to fully simulate a human brain. This claim inspired Noah to chronicle the project, visiting Henry and his team...

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. Lauren Ross is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She studies and writes about causal and non-causal explanations in philosophy of science, including distinctions among causal structures. Throughout her work, Lauren employs Jame's Woodward's interventionist approach to causation, which Jim and I discussed...

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. James Woodward is a recently retired Professor from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Jim has tremendously influenced the field of causal explanation in the philosophy of science. His account of causation centers around intervention - intervening on a cause should alter its effect....

Check out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience. Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Large language models, often now called "foundation models", are the model de jour in AI, based on the transformer architecture. In this episode, I bring together Evelina Fedorenko and Emily M. Bender to discuss how language models stack up to our own language processing and generation (models and brains both excel at next-word...

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. Rodolphe Sepulchre is a control engineer and theorist at Cambridge University. He focuses on applying feedback control engineering principles to build circuits that model neurons and neuronal circuits. We discuss his work on mixed feedback control - positive and negative - as an underlying principle of the mixed digital and analog brain...

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Cameron Buckner is a philosopher and cognitive scientist at The University of Houston. He is writing a book about the age-old philosophical debate on how much of our knowledge is innate (nature, rationalism) versus how much is learned (nurture, empiricism). In the book and his other works, Cameron argues that modern AI can help settle the...

Check out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience. Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Carina Curto is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at The Pennsylvania State University. She uses her background skills in mathematical physics/string theory to study networks of neurons. On this episode, we discuss the world of topology in neuroscience - the study of the geometrical structures mapped out by active...

Check out my short video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience. Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Jeff Schall is the director of the Center for Visual Neurophysiology at York University, where he runs the Schall Lab. His research centers around studying the mechanisms of our decisions, choices, movement control, and attention within the saccadic eye movement brain systems and in mathematical psychology models- in other words,...