Behavioral Neuroscience podcasts

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

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

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

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.