From Our Neurons to Yours

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How basic science transformed stroke care | Marion Buckwalter Jun 26, 2025

Show notes

A generation ago, a big clot in the brain meant paralysis or worse. Today, doctors can diagnose clots on AI-enabled brain scans; provide life-saving, targeted medications; or snake a catheter from a patient’s groin into the brain to vacuum out the clot. If they intervene in time, they can watch speech and movement return before the sedatives wear off. How did that happen—and what’s still missing?

In this episode of From Our Neurons to Yours, Stanford neuroscientist and neurocritical care specialist Marion Buckwalter, MD, PhD retraces the 70-year chain of curiosity-driven research—biochemistry, imaging, materials science, AI—behind today’s remarkable improvements in stroke care. She also warns what future breakthroughs are at stake if support for basic science stalls.

Learn More

Buckwalter Lab site

History of Stroke Care:

Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Acute Ischemic Stroke (NINDS) On the development of the first-gen clot-busting drug, tPA
Optimizing endovascular therapy for ischemic stroke (NINDS) On the development of mechanical clot clearance using thrombectomy.
Mechanical Thrombectomy for Large Ischemic Stroke (Neurology, 2023) A literature meta-analysis shows that thrombectomy improves stroke outcomes by 2.5X, on top of 2X improvements from clot-busting drugs

The uncertain future of federal support for science

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant (New York Times, 2025)
Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (New York Times, 2025)

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We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

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Surgery as a window into brain resilience | Martin Angst Jun 12, 2025

Show notes

We've all heard stories about someone who went in for surgery and came out...different. A grandmother who struggled with names after hip replacement, or an uncle who seemed foggy for months following cardiac bypass. But why does this happen to some people while others bounce right back?

This week, we explore this question with Dr. Martin Angst, a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford who's studying the biological factors that determine cognitive outcomes after surgery. With support from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, Martin and his team are following hundreds of cardiac surgery patients, tracking everything from blood biomarkers to cognitive performance both before and after their procedures.

Their findings are revealing fascinating insights about what makes some brains more resilient than others when faced with the significant stress of major surgery - insights that could help physicians better advise patients and potentially lead to interventions that enhance resilience.

Under the Lights: What Surgery Reveals About Brain Resilience (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
Infusion of young donor plasma components in older patients modifies the immune and inflammatory response to surgical tissue injury: a randomized clinical trial (Journal of Translational Medicine, 2025)
Blood test predicts recovery after hip-replacement surgery, study finds (Stanford Medicine, 2021)
Can major surgery increase risk for Alzheimer's disease? (Stanford Medicine, 2021)
Plasma Biomarkers of Tau and Neurodegeneration During Major Cardiac and Noncardiac Surgery (JAMA Neurology, 2021)

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Iniative for Brain Resilience.

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Best of: How neural prosthetics could free minds trapped by brain injury | Jaimie Henderson May 29, 2025

Show notes

Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries.
We're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the archives: our 2024 conversation with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological disorders and restore communication for those who have lost the ability to speak.
We also discuss the legacy of the late Krishna Shenoy and his transformative work in this field.
Learn more
Henderson's Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab
BrainGate Consortium – "Turning thought into action"
‘Unprecedented’ level of control allows person without use of limbs to operate virtual quadcopter (University of Michigan, 2025)

Brain Implants Helped 5 People Recover From Traumatic Injuries (New York Times, 2023)

The man who controls computers with his mind (New York Times Magazine, 2022)
Software turns ‘mental handwriting’ into on-screen words, sentences (Stanford Medicine, 2021)

Related video: Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2021
Related publication: Nature, 2021

Learn about the work of the late Krishna Shenoy
Krishna V. Shenoy (1968–2023) (Nature Neuroscience, 2023)
Krishna Shenoy, engineer who reimagined how the brain makes the body move, dies at 54 (Stanford Engineering, 2023)

Episode Credits

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu.

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The secrets of resilient aging | Beth Mormino & Anthony Wagner May 15, 2025

Show notes

This week on the show, we're have our sights set on healthy aging. What would it mean to be able to live to 80, 90 or 100 with our cognitive abilities intact and able to maintain an independent lifestyle right to the end of our days?

We're joined by Beth Mormino and Anthony Wagner who lead the Stanford Aging and Memory Study, which recruits cognitively healthy older adults to understand what makes their brains particularly resilient — and how more of us could join them in living the dream of healthy aging.

Learn More

Further Reading

Alzheimer's 'resilience signature' predicts who will develop dementia—and how fast (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
Latest Alzheimer's lab tests focus on memory loss, not brain plaques (NPR, 2025)

References

Trelle, A. N., ... & Wagner, A. D. (2020). Hippocampal and cortical mechanisms at retrieval explain variability in episodic remembering in older adults. eLife, 9:e55335. doi: 10.7554/eLife.55335 PDF | PMID:32469308
Trelle, A. N., ..., Wagner, A. D., Mormino, E. C., & Wilson, E. N. (2025). Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 is sensitive to early cerebral amyloid accumulation and predicts risk of cognitive decline across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 21:e14442. PDF | PMID:39713875
Sheng, J., ..., Mormino, E., & Wagner, A. D. (submitted). Top-down attention and Alzheimer's pathology impact cortical selectivity during learning, influencing episodic memory in older adults. Preprint

Episode Credits

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Building AI simulations of the human brain | Dan Yamins May 01, 2025

Show notes

This week on the show: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain?

Last month, Stanford researcher Andreas Tolias and colleagues created a "digital twin" of the mouse visual cortex. The researchers used the same foundation model approach that powers ChatGPT, but instead of training the model on text, the team trained in on brain activity recorded while mice watched action movies. The result? A digital model that can predict how neurons would respond to entirely new visual inputs.

This landmark study is a preview of the unprecedented research possibilities made possible by foundation models of the brain—models which replicate the fundamental algorithms of brain activity, but can be studied with complete control and replicated across hundreds of laboratories.

But it raises a profound question: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain?

This week we talk with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Dan Yamins, who has been exploring just this question with a broad range of Stanford colleagues and collaborators. We talk about what such human brain simulations might look like, how they would work, and what they might teach us about the fundamental algorithms of perception and cognition.

Learn more

AI models of the brain could serve as 'digital twins' in research (Stanford Medicine, 2025)

An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible (New York Times, 2025)

The co-evolution of neuroscience and AI (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

How Artificial Neural Networks Help Us Understand Neural Networks in the Human Brain (Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), 2021)

Related research

A Task-Optimized Neural Network Replicates Human Auditory Behavior... (PNAS, 2014)

Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents (Nature, 2018)

The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing (PNAS, 2021)

Using deep reinforcement learning to reveal how the brain encodes abstract state-space representations... (Neuron, 2021)

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu.

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

What ChatGPT understands: Large language models and the neuroscience of meaning | Laura Gwilliams Apr 17, 2025

Show notes

If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word.

But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human brain, we talked about how similar they are? What if we could use these large language models to help us understand how our own brains process language to extract meaning?

There's no one better positioned to take us through this than returning guest Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science Institute, and a member of the department of psychology here at Stanford.

Learn more:

Gwilliams' Laboratory of Speech Neuroscience

Fireside chat on AI and Neuroscience at Wu Tsai Neuro's 2024 Symposium (video)

The co-evolution of neuroscience and AI (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

How we understand each other (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)

Q&A: On the frontiers of speech science (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)

Computational Architecture of Speech Comprehension in the Human Brain (Annual Review of Linguistics, 2025)

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain (PMC Preprint, 2025)

Behind the Scenes segment:

By re-creating neural pathway in dish, Sergiu Pasca's research may speed pain treatment (Stanford Medicine, 2025)

Bridging nature and nurture: The brain's flexible foundation from birth (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

What the other half of the brain does | Brad Zuchero Apr 03, 2025

Show notes

We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia science was founded here at Stanford in the lab of the late, great Ben Barres.

No one is better suited to take us through this history and lead us to the frontiers of the field than today's guest, Brad Zuchero.

A former Barres lab postdoc, and now an emerging leader in this field in his own right, Brad gives us an overview of our growing understanding of the various different kinds of glia and their roles in brain function, and shares the exciting discoveries emerging from his lab — including growing evidence of a role for myelin in Alzheimers disease.

Learn More

Neuroscientist Ben Barres, who identified crucial roles of glial cells, dies at 63 (Stanford Medicine, 2017)
How exciting! Study reveals neurons rely on glial cells to become electrically excitable (Stanford Neurosurgery, 2024)
Unlocking the secrets of myelin repair (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
Q&A: Linking sleep, brain insulation, and neurological disease with postdoc Daniela Rojo (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
From angel to demon: Why some brain cells go ‘bad’ (Scope Blog, 2021)

Get in touch

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Stimulating the brain with sound | Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan Mar 20, 2025

Show notes

As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve.

Today we're going to be talking with neuroscientists who aim to solve this problem with sound. And not just any sound: ultrasound.

Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan from the Stanford Department of Radiology are developing ultrasound technology in a couple of different ways to essentially reach into the brain to treat brain disorders that are otherwise hard to access. These uses of ultrasound haven't yet reached the clinic, but could be entering clinical testing in people in the next few years.

Mentioned on the Show

Meet the 2025 Neurosciences Postdoctoral Scholars (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
Butts Pauly Lab
Airan Lab
Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
Advancing Brain Resilience: 2024 Catalyst and Pilot Grant Awards (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
Researchers find response to ketamine depends on opioid pathways, but varies by sex (Stanford Medicine)
A New Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation System for Preclinical Brain Research (Focused Ultrasound Foundation, 2024)
Translating Neuroscience Advances into Real World Uses (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)

Get in touch
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Does good sleep insulate the brain against Alzheimer's? | Erin Gibson Mar 06, 2025

Show notes

We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease.

To unpack this complex relationship, we're thrilled to welcome back Erin Gibson, assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford School of Medicine and Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate.

We'll explore whether age-related sleep changes are potential contributors to brain degeneration or valuable early indicators of otherwise invisible brain disorders, possibly opening doors for early intervention.

We'll also learn about Gibson's research, supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro, which investigates how myelin—the insulation of our nerve cells—could be a key missing link in understanding the relationship between sleep and brain health.

Join us for an enlightening discussion that might just change how you think about your nightly slumber and its profound impact on long-term cognitive function.

Mentioned on the Show

Related Episodes

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and research assistance by G Kumar. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience.

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

How to live in a world without free will | Robert Sapolsky Dec 05, 2024

Show notes

Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament."
In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control.
Before we get into it, it's worth saying that where this is heading, the reason to care about this question is that Sapolsky's argument has profound moral implications for our understanding of justice, personal responsibility, and whether any of us deserve to be judged or praised for our actions.
Mentioned on the Show

Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Sapolsky, 2023)
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Sapolsky, 2018 )
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons (Sapolsky, 2002)
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Mitchell, 2023)
Sapolsky / Mitchell Debates – Part 1 (2023), Part 2 (2024)

Related Episodes

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.
Episode Credits

Send us a text!

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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