Topic: Cognitive maps

Postdoctoral research with Christian Doeller at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. The group studies structured representations supporting navigation, episodic and working memory, learning and decision-making. Projects connect hippocampal population coding with knowledge representations and possible translation to Alzheimer’s disease. Approaches include high-field fMRI, MEG, EEG, virtual reality, psychophysics and computational models, including machine learning and deep neural networks. The project can be shaped around interdisciplinary intere

Daniel Levenstein discusses spontaneous neural activity during sleep and its links to learning, memory and navigation. The conversation explores AI models as tools for understanding hippocampal and cortical dynamics, the relationship between experiments and theory, cognitive maps, world models, spiking networks and transformers. It also addresses the transition from postdoctoral researcher to running a laboratory. The episode was published on 2 September 2026 and runs for 1 hour, 36 minutes and 11 seconds.