Podcast – The Connectome

“Mindfulness and Other Neurotechnologies” – Podcast 17: John Vervaeke

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Fri, 09 Dec 2016 23:13:57 +0000

Ben is joined by John Vervaeke, a researcher who finds ways to integrate and synthesize information across a wide range of fields: neural stimulation technology, mindfulness meditation, altered states of consciousness… and helps researchers from all these fields discover common patterns in their data, in order to achieve brand-new collaborative insights about consciousness.

In his lifelong quest for a clearer understanding of the human mind, Vervaeke feels especially compelled by the challenge of creating a new scientifically-driven system of wisdom, which can help us more meaningfully contextualize ourselves in a universe where many brain-related boundaries are breaking down.

(Produced by Sean Barnes)

“Your Brain on LSD” – Podcast 16: Robin Carhart-Harris

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 19:44:19 +0000

Depth psychology. Jungian symbolism. Psychedelic drugs. Mystery religions. fMRI scans. Dream states vs. awake states. Functional connectomics. Animal consciousness. Neural correlates of the ego and the unconscious mind. All in a one-hour conversation.

Ben is joined by Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher at Imperial College, London who conducted a study many of us have been waiting for for more than 40 years: He gave people LSD, put them in a cutting-edge fMRI scanner, and mapped how their brain connectivity changed while they were on the drug.

Here’s on the podcast to talk about that, and a whole lot more.

(Produced by Sean Barnes)

“Making Better Decisions… Scientifically” – Podcast 15: Teagan Wall

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 21:04:00 +0000

We all have moments of wondering, “Why did I make that decision? Why did my brain want to do that?”

Teagan Wall has devoted her career to studying questions like these, and she joins Ben today to talk about the neural influences that drive us to buy things we don’t need, to get addicted to the things we enjoy, and to make decisions that put us at risk.

She’s even got some science-based tips for anyone struggling with addiction, or with any tough choice.

(Produced by Sean Barnes)

“The Hard Science of Consciousness Research” – Podcast 14: Bernard Baars

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Fri, 15 Jan 2016 20:47:33 +0000

New neuroscience discoveries about consciousness keep popping up all the time — but where’s the line between abstract philosophy and hard science?

Ben is joined by Bernard Baars, one of the founding fathers of the modern neuroscience of consciousness, to talk about what’s really going on at the cutting edge of data-driven consciousness research.

(Produced by Sean Barnes)

“2014’s Nobel Prize Co-Winner” – Podcast 13: Edvard Moser

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:18:21 +0000

Have you ever wondered what language your brain speaks when it talks to itself? Not your inner monologue, but the coded messages that your brain uses to collect, analyze, and make predictions about your environment. What would it feel like to decode even a small fraction of the signals flashing back and forth deep inside the brain – and know exactly what they encode?

Ben is joined by Edvard Moser, who won the 2014 neuroscience Nobel prize for doing exactly that. Along with his wife May-Britt and his teacher John O’Keefe, Edvard co-discovered a system of neurons known as entorhinal grid cells, which actually encode memories of the physical environment on a tiled hexagonal grid, almost like a game board.

Edvard joins us today to talk about why neuroscience is necessary for answering psychological questions, how that realization led him to study the brain’s spatial memory system, and how that project led him to the startling discoveries that earned him one of the quickest Nobel prizes in recent history.

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Tim Udall)

“Using Light to Talk With Neurons” – Podcast 12: Michael Hausser

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:17:46 +0000

Ben talks with Michael Hausser, a researcher who reads and writes information to and from brain cells with laser signals. This area of neuroscience – known as optogenetics – is one of the fastest-moving fields in science today, and Hausser and his team are on the cutting edge of it.

They’ve just designed a new system that can read output from networks of neurons, select specific neurons to target in response to that output, shoot laser signals at the selected neurons, listen for a response from them, change targets again, and repeat – holding active dialogues with neural networks in the brains of living, awake animals.

Michael’s on the show today to talk about this new project, about the science of optogenetics and how it relates to connectomics, and about what the near future holds for computerized interaction with living animals’ brains.

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Tim Udall)

“2013’s Nobel Prize Winners” — Podcast 11: James Rothman, Randy Schekman & Thomas Südhof

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:16:16 +0000

Ben is joined by all three of 2013’s Nobel Prize winners in the Physiology/Medicine category — James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Südhof!

All three of these guys contributed crucial pieces to a longstanding puzzle: How, exactly, do our brain cells communicate with each other? Biologists had known since the 1960s that nerve cells pass chemical messages to one another inside hollow little globs of proteins called synaptic vesicles — and yet, as recently as the early 90s, no one had figured out much of anything about how this process worked.

Meanwhile, as James Rothman and Randy Schekman plugged away on their own seemingly unrelated projects — cell metabolism and yeast genetics — they were both starting to notice something intriguing: The chemical reactions they were studying looked like suspiciously good candidates for certain stages of the brain’s vesicle transmission process. And sure enough, before long, a young researcher named Thomas Südhof started to discover many of those very same chemicals in brain cells…

Click the “Play” button below, and they’ll tell you how their journey to a Nobel prize unfolded from there. And for more info on these guys and their research, check out my article in Scientific American: “The Search for a Nobel Prize-Winning Synapse Machine.”

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Devin O’Neill, with lots of help from Tim Udall)

“Crowdsourcing a Neuroscience Revolution” — Podcast 10: Sebastian Seung

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:15:23 +0000

Ben chats with Sebastian Seung, a neuroscience researcher whose latest work — in cooperation with teams at MIT, at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and at other cutting-edge institutions — is proving that an improbable-sounding dream isn’t so improbable after all: We may be able to map the structure and function of every neural connection in an entire mammalian nervous system, from the cellular level up… and it may happen within our lifetimes.

Seung’s bestselling book Connectome offers an exciting tour through this fast-growing field of connectomics — and in fact, it was his TEDTalk, “I Am My Connectome,” that sparked the creation of this very website, almost three years ago. His lab also created the free crowdsource game EyeWire, which lets anyone with a computer and an internet connection help his research team map the cellular structure of the brain.

But he’s on the show today to talk about the latest project he and his co-researchers have published: A structural map of all 950+ neurons in a patch of retina. Not only does this project represent a leap upward in complexity of neural mapping — it also required innovative new techniques for crunching massive amounts of data; and the result is a proof-of-concept for a revolution in the way we approach our study of the brain.

You can read more here, in Ben’s article for Scientific American: “The Neuroscience Revolution Will Be Crowdsourced.”

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Devin O’Neill)

“Learning How Brains Learn” — Podcast 9: Jeff Hawkins

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:14:34 +0000

On Episode 9 of the Connectome podcast, Ben is joined by Jeff Hawkins, a computer engineer and neuroscience geek who’s obsessed with understanding how the brain learns.

Jeff is the inventor of the Palm Pilot and the founder of Palm Computing – as well as another computing company called Handspring – but in addition to his computer skills, he’s also been fascinated by neuroscience since the late 70s. Today, his company Numenta designs a range of software known as Grok, which learns and thinks like a living brain.

Jeff’s superb book On Intelligence lays out his theory in detail, and he also runs over the basics in this podcast. If you’re interested in digging further, here’s a link to Numenta’s technical documentation of how their software works, and here’s a page with lots of videos of Jeff’s other media appearances.

As you’ll hear on this podcast, though, Jeff’s curiosity extends far beyond software engineering, and explores subjects from space exploration to computing’s future to the nature of intelligence itself. Listen in, and you may find that your own curiosity gets sparked, too.

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Devin O’Neill)

“Hallucination, Imagination, Dreams & Drugs” — Podcast 8: Oliver Sacks

theconnectome@gmail.com (Ben Thomas) — Thu, 02 Jul 2015 17:13:51 +0000

On Episode 8 of the Connectome podcast, Ben talks with Oliver Sacks, renowned neuroscientist and author of such books as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Hallucinations. In particular, Sacks joins us to talk about some patients of his who’ve been hallucinating strange varieties of musical notation.

But musical hallucinations are only the beginning – Sacks also shares his insights on dreams, hallucinogenic drugs, selfhood, and plenty of other phenomena that make subjective experience so mysterious. Whether you’re new to Dr. Sacks’ work or a lifelong fan of his writing, this interview raises some consciousness-related questions that you may never have considered before.

Enjoy, and feel free to email us questions and suggestions for next time!

(Produced by Devin O’Neill)