Neuroanatomy podcasts

Neuroscientist George Paxinos speaks with Thanos Chatziandreou about brain mapping, consciousness and the questions that remain open in neuroscience. The Greek-language conversation also considers neurodegenerative disease, prevention, AI and the relationship between scientific knowledge, human behaviour and responsibility for the future.

Hosted by Θάνος Χατζηανδρέου

Science journalists discuss why the food-borne illness cyclosporiasis is difficult to track and a new map of a major highway in the human nervous system. Leslie Chan then explains an ingestible metabolic probe that detects gut-microbiome enzyme activity from volatile signals in the breath.

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.

Ad Aertsen reflects on Valentino Braitenberg's contributions to neuroscience, including anatomy, synthetic psychology and theories of neural computation.

A panel examines whether a static synaptic wiring diagram can reveal a specific learned memory. The discussion addresses experimental designs and benchmarks, connectome proofreading bottlenecks, definitions of memory, differences across model organisms and the technological and conceptual limits of connectome decoding. The publisher notes imperfect audio and provides a subtitled video version.

Hermann Cuntz discusses computational explanations of dendritic branching and the construction of synthetic neuronal morphologies.

A panel at Aspirational Neuroscience examines whether a meaningful memory could be recovered from a static connectome. Anton Arkhipov, Konrad Kording, Tomás Ryan, Srinivas Turaga, Dong Song and Zhihao Zheng discuss the technologies, biological information and conceptual obstacles involved, with an introduction by Kenneth Hayworth and moderation by Paul Middlebrooks. The publisher supplies audio only.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks