Brain Inspired

Andrea Gambarotto examines agency and intrinsic purpose in biological cognition, drawing on Hegel and contemporary theoretical biology. The conversation connects these ideas to enactivism and asks how living intelligence differs from artificial systems, including language models.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Daniel Levenstein discusses spontaneous activity in the hippocampus and cortex, especially during sleep, and its relationship to learning, memory and navigation. He explains how AI models can help investigate these dynamics, alongside questions about model systems, cognitive maps and the relationship between neuroscience experiments and theory.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Marco Facchin discusses how neuroscience and philosophy explain cognition, including embodied and enactive approaches, the importance of biological detail, and limits of computational accounts. The conversation also examines predictive processing, representation and the role of AI in understanding brains and minds.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Cristopher Moore connects computational complexity to questions about cognition and artificial intelligence. The discussion considers what makes a problem difficult, how rugged landscapes shape computation, and what complexity theory can contribute to understanding learning and generalization in brains and machines.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

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

James Harrison presents his proposed account of hypnosis as mental foraging, relating changes in attention and internal state to memory and prediction. The conversation explores interoception, engagement with the external world and memory reconsolidation as possible ways to explain hypnotic experience.

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

Liset de la Prida discusses hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and their relationship to replay and memory. The conversation connects different ripple patterns and neuron types to population activity, asking how particular cells help shape the lower-dimensional dynamics used to describe neural computation.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks

Romain Brette questions familiar computational and information-processing metaphors for the brain. Starting from behavior in organisms such as paramecia, he considers cognition as an activity of living systems, the autonomy of interacting cells, and the distinction between anticipation and prediction, with implications for artificial intelligence.

Hosted by Paul Middlebrooks