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Brain Inspired — Natural Sciences
Brain Inspired

Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.

Copyright: © 2019 Brain-Inspired

Latest Episodes:

BI 177 Special: Bernstein Workshop Panel Oct 30, 2023

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I was recently invited to moderate a panel at the Annual Bernstein conference - this one was in Berlin Germany. The panel I moderated was at a satellite workshop at the conference called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience? Below are the panelists. I hope you enjoy the discussion!

Program: How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience?
Panelists:
- Katrin Franke
  - Lab website.
  - Twitter: @kfrankelab.
- Ralf Haefner
  - Haefner lab.
  - Twitter: @haefnerlab.
- Martin Hebart
  - Hebart Lab.
  - Twitter: @martin_hebart.
- Johannes Jaeger
  - Yogi's website.
  - Twitter: @yoginho.
- Fred Wolf
  - Fred's university webpage.

Organizers:

Alexander Ecker | University of Göttingen, Germany
Fabian Sinz | University of Göttingen, Germany
Mohammad Bashiri, Pavithra Elumalai, Michaela Vystrcilová | University of Göttingen, Germany

BI 176 David Poeppel Returns Oct 14, 2023

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David runs his lab at NYU, where they stud`y auditory cognition, speech perception, language, and music. On the heels of the episode with David Glanzman, we discuss the ongoing mystery regarding how memory works, how to study and think about brains and minds, and the reemergence (perhaps) of the language of thought hypothesis.

David has been on the podcast a few times... once by himself, and again with Gyorgy Buzsaki.

0:00 - Intro 11:17 - Across levels 14:598 - Nature of memory 24:12 - Using the right tools for the right question 35:46 - LLMs, what they need, how they've shaped David's thoughts 44:55 - Across levels 54:07 - Speed of progress 1:02:21 - Neuroethology and mental illness - patreon 1:24:42 - Language of Thought

BI 175 Kevin Mitchell: Free Agents Oct 03, 2023

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Kevin Mitchell is professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. He's been on the podcast before, and we talked a little about his previous book, Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. He's back today to discuss his new book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. The book is written very well and guides the reader through a wide range of scientific knowledge and reasoning that undergirds Kevin's main take home: our free will comes from the fact that we are biological organisms, biological organisms have agency, and as that agency evolved to become more complex and layered, so does our ability to exert free will. We touch on a handful of topics in the book, like the idea of agency, how it came about at the origin of life, and how the complexity of kinds of agency, the richness of our agency, evolved as organisms became more complex.

We also discuss Kevin's reliance on the indeterminacy of the universe to tell his story, the underlying randomness at fundamental levels of physics. Although indeterminacy isn't necessary for ongoing free will, it is responsible for the capacity for free will to exist in the first place. We discuss the brain's ability to harness its own randomness when needed, creativity, whether and how it's possible to create something new, artificial free will, and lots more.

Kevin's website.
Twitter: @WiringtheBrain
Book: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

4:27 - From Innate to Free Agents 9:14 - Thinking of the whole organism 15:11 - Who the book is for 19:49 - What bothers Kevin 27:00 - Indeterminacy 30:08 - How it all began 33:08 - How indeterminacy helps 43:58 - Libet's free will experiments 50:36 - Creativity 59:16 - Selves, subjective experience, agency, and free will 1:10:04 - Levels of agency and free will 1:20:38 - How much free will can we have? 1:28:03 - Hierarchy of mind constraints 1:36:39 - Artificial agents and free will 1:42:57 - Next book?

BI 174 Alicia Juarrero: Context Changes Everything Sep 13, 2023

Show notes

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Alicia Juarrero is a philosopher and has been interested in complexity since before it was cool.

In this episode, we discuss many of the topics and ideas in her new book, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence, which makes the thorough case that constraints should be given way more attention when trying to understand complex systems like brains and minds - how they're organized, how they operate, how they're formed and maintained, and so on. Modern science, thanks in large part to the success of physics, focuses on a single kind of causation - the kind involved when one billiard ball strikes another billiard ball. But that kind of causation neglects what Alicia argues are the most important features of complex systems the constraints that shape the dynamics and possibility spaces of systems. Much of Alicia's book describes the wide range of types of constraints we should be paying attention to, and how they interact and mutually influence each other. I highly recommend the book, and you may want to read it before, during, and after our conversation. That's partly because, if you're like me, the concepts she discusses still aren't comfortable to think about the way we're used to thinking about how things interact. Thinking across levels of organization turns out to be hard. You might also want her book handy because, hang on to your hats, we jump around a lot among those concepts. Context Changes everything comes about 25 years after her previous classic, Dynamics In Action, which we also discuss and which I also recommend if you want more of a primer to her newer more expansive work. Alicia's work touches on all things complex, from self-organizing systems like whirlpools, to ecologies, businesses, societies, and of course minds and brains.

Book:
- Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence

0:00 - Intro 3:37 - 25 years thinking about constraints 8:45 - Dynamics in Action and eliminativism 13:08 - Efficient and other kinds of causation 19:04 - Complexity via context independent and dependent constraints 25:53 - Enabling and limiting constraints 30:55 - Across scales 36:32 - Temporal constraints 42:58 - A constraint cookbook? 52:12 - Constraints in a mechanistic worldview 53:42 - How to explain using constraints 56:22 - Concepts and multiple realizabillity 59:00 - Kevin Mitchell question 1:08:07 - Mac Shine Question 1:19:07 - 4E 1:21:38 - Dimensionality across levels 1:27:26 - AI and constraints 1:33:08 - AI and life

BI 173 Justin Wood: Origins of Visual Intelligence Aug 30, 2023

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In the intro, I mention the Bernstein conference workshop I'll participate in, called How can machine learning be used to generate insights and theories in neuroscience?. Follow that link to learn more, and register for the conference here. Hope to see you there in late September in Berlin!

Justin Wood runs the Wood Lab at Indiana University, and his lab's tagline is "building newborn minds in virtual worlds." In this episode, we discuss his work comparing the visual cognition of newborn chicks and AI models. He uses a controlled-rearing technique with natural chicks, whereby the chicks are raised from birth in completely controlled visual environments. That way, Justin can present designed visual stimuli to test what kinds of visual abilities chicks have or can immediately learn. Then he can building models and AI agents that are trained on the same data as the newborn chicks. The goal is to use the models to better understand natural visual intelligence, and use what we know about natural visual intelligence to help build systems that better emulate biological organisms. We discuss some of the visual abilities of the chicks and what he's found using convolutional neural networks. Beyond vision, we discuss his work studying the development of collective behavior, which compares chicks to a model that uses CNNs, reinforcement learning, and an intrinsic curiosity reward function. All of this informs the age-old nature (nativist) vs. nurture (empiricist) debates, which Justin believes should give way to embrace both nature and nurture.

Wood lab.
Related papers:
Justin mentions these papers:
- Untangling invariant object recognition (Dicarlo & Cox 2007)

0:00 - Intro 5:39 - Origins of Justin's current research 11:17 - Controlled rearing approach 21:52 - Comparing newborns and AI models 24:11 - Nativism vs. empiricism 28:15 - CNNs and early visual cognition 29:35 - Smoothness and slowness 50:05 - Early biological development 53:27 - Naturalistic vs. highly controlled 56:30 - Collective behavior in animals and machines 1:02:34 - Curiosity and critical periods 1:09:05 - Controlled rearing vs. other developmental studies 1:13:25 - Breaking natural rules 1:16:33 - Deep RL collective behavior 1:23:16 - Bottom-up and top-down

BI 172 David Glanzman: Memory All The Way Down Aug 07, 2023

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David runs his lab at UCLA where he's also a distinguished professor. David used to believe what is currently the mainstream view, that our memories are stored in our synapses, those connections between our neurons. So as we learn, the synaptic connections strengthen and weaken until their just right, and that serves to preserve the memory. That's been the dominant view in neuroscience for decades, and is the fundamental principle that underlies basically all of deep learning in AI. But because of his own and others experiments, which he describes in this episode, David has come to the conclusion that memory must be stored not at the synapse, but in the nucleus of neurons, likely by some epigenetic mechanism mediated by RNA molecules. If this sounds familiar, I had Randy Gallistel on the the podcast on episode 126 to discuss similar ideas, and David discusses where he and Randy differ in their thoughts. This episode starts out pretty technical as David describes the series of experiments that changed his mind, but after that we broaden our discussion to a lot of the surrounding issues regarding whether and if his story about memory is true. And we discuss meta-issues like how old discarded ideas in science often find their way back, what it's like studying non-mainstream topic, including challenges trying to get funded for it, and so on.

David's Faculty Page.
Related papers
- The central importance of nuclear mechanisms in the storage of memory.
- David mentions Arc and virus-like transmission:
  - The Neuronal Gene Arc Encodes a Repurposed Retrotransposon Gag Protein that Mediates Intercellular RNA Transfer.
  - Structure of an Arc-ane virus-like capsid.
David mentions many of the ideas from the Pushing the Boundaries: Neuroscience, Cognition, and Life Symposium.
Related episodes:
- BI 126 Randy Gallistel: Where Is the Engram?
- BI 127 Tomás Ryan: Memory, Instinct, and Forgetting

BI 171 Mike Frank: Early Language and Cognition Jul 22, 2023

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Check out my free video series about what's missing in AI and Neuroscience

My guest is Michael C. Frank, better known as Mike Frank, who runs the Language and Cognition lab at Stanford. Mike's main interests center on how children learn language - in particular he focuses a lot on early word learning, and what that tells us about our other cognitive functions, like concept formation and social cognition.

We discuss that, his love for developing open data sets that anyone can use,

The dance he dances between bottom-up data-driven approaches in this big data era, traditional experimental approaches, and top-down theory-driven approaches

How early language learning in children differs from LLM learning

Mike's rational speech act model of language use, which considers the intentions or pragmatics of speakers and listeners in dialogue.

Language & Cognition Lab
Twitter: @mcxfrank.
- I mentioned Mike's tweet thread about saying LLMs "have" cognitive functions:
Related papers:

BI 170 Ali Mohebi: Starting a Research Lab Jul 11, 2023

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In this episode I have a casual chat with Ali Mohebi about his new faculty position and his plans for the future.

Ali's website.
Twitter: @mohebial

BI 169 Andrea Martin: Neural Dynamics and Language Jun 28, 2023

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My guest today is Andrea Martin, who is the Research Group Leader in the department of Language and Computation in Neural Systems at the Max Plank Institute and the Donders Institute. Andrea is deeply interested in understanding how our biological brains process and represent language. To this end, she is developing a theoretical model of language. The aim of the model is to account for the properties of language, like its structure, its compositionality, its infinite expressibility, while adhering to physiological data we can measure from human brains.

Her theoretical model of language, among other things, brings in the idea of low-dimensional manifolds and neural dynamics along those manifolds. We've discussed manifolds a lot on the podcast, but they are a kind of abstract structure in the space of possible neural population activity - the neural dynamics. And that manifold structure defines the range of possible trajectories, or pathways, the neural dynamics can take over time.

One of Andrea's ideas is that manifolds might be a way for the brain to combine two properties of how we learn and use language. One of those properties is the statistical regularities found in language - a given word, for example, occurs more often near some words and less often near some other words. This statistical approach is the foundation of how large language models are trained. The other property is the more formal structure of language: how it's arranged and organized in such a way that gives it meaning to us. Perhaps these two properties of language can come together as a single trajectory along a neural manifold. But she has lots of ideas, and we discuss many of them. And of course we discuss large language models, and how Andrea thinks of them with respect to biological cognition. We talk about modeling in general and what models do and don't tell us, and much more.

Andrea's website.
Twitter: @andrea_e_martin.
Related papers
Andrea mentions this book: The Geometry of Biological Time.

BI 168 Frauke Sandig and Eric Black w Alex Gomez-Marin: AWARE: Glimpses of Consciousness Jun 02, 2023

Show notes

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This is one in a periodic series of episodes with Alex Gomez-Marin, exploring how the arts and humanities can impact (neuro)science. Artistic creations, like cinema, have the ability to momentarily lower our ever-critical scientific mindset and allow us to imagine alternate possibilities and experience emotions outside our normal scientific routines. Might this feature of art potentially change our scientific attitudes and perspectives?

Frauke Sandig and Eric Black recently made the documentary film AWARE: Glimpses of Consciousness, which profiles six researchers studying consciousness from different perspectives. The film is filled with rich visual imagery and conveys a sense of wonder and awe in trying to understand subjective experience, while diving deep into the reflections of the scientists and thinkers approaching the topic from their various perspectives.

This isn't a "normal" Brain Inspired episode, but I hope you enjoy the discussion!

0:00 - Intro 19:42 - Mechanistic reductionism 45:33 - Changing views during lifetime 53:49 - Did making the film alter your views? 57:49 - ChatGPT 1:04:20 - Materialist assumption 1:11:00 - Science of consciousness 1:20:49 - Transhumanism 1:32:01 - Integrity 1:36:19 - Aesthetics 1:39:50 - Response to the film

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