Podcast – The Connectome: Recent Episodes
Ben Thomas
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …