We sat down with Lukas Ian Schmitt (@lucidianS), a team leader at RIKEN CBS, and talked about his trajectory, life in Japan, past and ongoing projects about the distributed computation in the cortico-thalamic loop, and related works (Recorded on 9/10) Show Notes: Ian’s lab at RIKEN: Laboratory for Distributed Cognitive Processing Miho: Miho Nakajima-san Mike Halassa’s lab @NYU->MIT Phil Haydon’s lab @Tufts The Neuron by Kaczmarek (and Levitan) (Still have the original on my shelf here. – Ian) Ian’s work at the grad school: the astrocyte-neuron interaction  Ian’s works  during postdoc: Rule representations in the cross-modal sensory attention task #1 #2 (mentioned as ”The thalamo-cortical paper”, MD-mPFC loop) #3 Guo/Inagaki’s paper (VM/VAL-ALM loop) If you change the rule sets, the dynamics change a little bit in subgroups of MD thalamic neurons A review discussing the region identified as the PPC  - Ian Ian’s strategy for the research  Ahena Akrami’s paper Jeremiah Cohen His recent publication on representation of the task history in PL Computational Advantages conferred by biologically inspired networks Structured networks sometimes perform better/faster Idea of having a parallel stream of processing through the thalamus is useful: I was thinking of some ideas from Murray Sherman and Sabine Kastner (e.g. this paper, and this) – Ian Editorial Notes: Really nice conversation though I guess we have some difference as to whether thalamic computational roles are an inevitable network design or just based on evolutionary history (I guess time and research will reveal who's right!) In any case, I really enjoyed talking science with you both! - Ian I enjoyed the discussion and it was nice to see the connection between Ian's work and others' on the thalamus. It seems the time has finally come to decipher thalamic functions and I hope our new work will change the way we think about how the brain computes information!　-Miho Recent evolutionary expansion in thalamus/LP could be just optimization around local minima. Let’s see how Ian’s work would discard this possibility! For now, we can happily agree to disagree!  - Kenta/萩 It was a perfect way to drop our first episode for both domestic and international listeners. Thanks, Ian and Miho! -Tak/脇