Behavioral Neuroscience podcasts

Sarah Crespi and Tim Appenzeller discuss a resurfaced Rosalind Franklin X-ray photograph and its implications for the history of DNA structure. Elah Feder then speaks with Andreas Nieder about experiments comparing the speed of decisions in crows and primates, considering neural mechanisms and evolutionary advantages. Phil Levin and David Hassler discuss collaboration between ecological research and poetry, with a reading by Lara Volski.

Hosted by Sarah Crespi

Jérémie Naudé and Albert Moukheiber join Alexandra Delbot to examine popular misconceptions about the brain, including claims about dopamine detoxes. They discuss what neuroscience experiments establish about dopamine and reward prediction, and how simplified biological narratives can distort research and public understanding.

Hosted by Alexandra Delbot

Andrew Huberman joins Patrick O’Shaughnessy to discuss the frontier of neurotechnology and sustained human performance. Their conversation considers the convergence of AI and biotechnology, gene-based methods for changing neural activity and motivation, and the relationships between visual behaviour, arousal and sleep. Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University.

Hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy

Madeleine Finlay interviews Boston University neuroscientist Steve Ramirez about locating, activating and removing rodent memories, and possible applications in humans.

Hosted by Madeleine Finlay

Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid discusses research on the motivations of people approaching or already committed to violent extremism. The conversation examines sacred values, social relationships and how psychological research may help disengage people from extremist ideas. The supporting research includes behavioural and neuroimaging studies of willingness to fight and die for a cause. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam. Hidden Brain Media dates this public episode release to 10 September 2026 and provides audio, research references and a transcript. The publisher notes that transcripts can reflect an earlier episode version.

Hosted by Shankar Vedantam

Masud Husain explains the neuroscience of motivation, dopamine, effort, and reward, together with research on apathy, dementia, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and cognitive resilience.

Ralph Adolphs explains how the brain creates emotions including fear, joy, and awe, and discusses evidence-based approaches to emotion regulation. The episode connects neural mechanisms with attention, decision-making, and bodily state.

Nature staff examine what an invisible watermark for AI-generated text could mean for research integrity and the detection of synthetic content, then discuss cross-cultural research showing that ticklishness is a distinct and specialized body sensation with common anatomical patterns.

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor explores why touch can feel painful or pleasurable and how scientists study those experiences. The conversation connects sensory pathways to social behavior and evolution, including work with unusual animal models and the challenge of interpreting subjective experience through experiments.

Hosted by Janna Levin

Andrew Huberman explains how key neuromodulators shape motivation, energy, focus and mood, with science-supported behavioral, nutritional and supplement strategies.

Alison Barth explains how distinct neuron types contribute to cortical function and how learning can be used as an experimental window into the organization and plasticity of cortical circuits.

This eLife episode explores trade-offs between body size and sperm production in gorillas, fever-driven changes in malaria-infected cells, the neuroscience of gambling machines, whether infants are predisposed to dance, and high-altitude adaptations in bird eggs.

Nedah Nemati examines how neuroscience defines behavior and why freely moving animals and naturalistic experiments matter. She discusses how tools, historical assumptions and researchers' own experience influence scientific questions, including what studies of sleep reveal about the relationship between observation and explanation.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Ehud Ahissar explains active perception through closed loops linking movement and sensation, drawing on work with rodent whiskers. He introduces perceptual dualism as a proposed distinction between communication within the brain and interactions with the world, and explores its implications for consciousness and neural dynamics.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Katherine Nagel discusses how fruit flies navigate using odour and how ring models can explain the short-term memory involved.

Juan Gallego discusses whether neural manifolds are real explanatory structures and how population activity relates to behaviour. Topics include causal interpretations, evolutionary claims, motor control and the limits of low-dimensional descriptions, along with work on restoring movement after spinal-cord injury.

Nachum Ulanovsky discusses studying nervous systems during natural behaviour. The conversation considers what researchers gain from observing animals in ecologically meaningful conditions and how new methods can connect neuroscience with evolution and ecology.

Lloyd Minor and Karl Deisseroth discuss how tools for mapping and controlling neural circuits are reshaping research on the human mind. Deisseroth recounts the development of optogenetics and its use in investigating the brain activity underlying emotion and behavior. They explore Stanford Medicine's Human Neural Circuitry research program and how advances in circuit-level neuroscience could improve understanding and treatment of mental illness. The conversation also considers scientific discovery and the importance of humility in research.

Hosted by Lloyd Minor

Ann Kennedy discusses theoretical approaches to subcortical circuits that support survival, motivation, threat responses and pain. Topics include neural heterogeneity, protein-related timescales, nervous-system evolution and the limits of focusing exclusively on spikes and cortex. She also describes efforts to make automated behavioural labels consistent across experiments.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Erich Jarvis compares the neurological and genetic foundations of learned vocal communication across species. In conversation with Janna Levin, he connects human speech with birdsong and other animal vocalizations, considers why vocal learning varies between species, and explores links between speech, movement and dance.

Hosted by Janna Levin