Free Daily Podcast Summary
Brain Inspired: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Paul Middlebrooks
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.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 4 days ago1h 58m
BI 246 Andrea Gambarotto: Cognition Requires Agency
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Andrea Gambarotto is a postdoctoral philosopher and researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He is an expert in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, most commonly known as Hegel. More recently he has been studying the relation between some of Hegel's ideas and those of modern theoretical biology regarding questions of autonomy and agency. Andrea argues that, where Immanuel Kant believed we should explain biological stuff and inanimate stuff the same way- via mechanistic explanations, Hegel believed to explain the biological stuff, we should leverage the fact the biological organisms have intrinsic purpose… agency. And, Hegel's approach is in line with what's called the enactive approach in cognitive science, which has a long history and continues to thrive. Andrea explains all of that during our discussion. One reason I invited Andrea on is because these issues get the heart of what some of us care about, which is, what are the differences and similarities between our natural intelligence and engineered artificial intelligence? Why should we care about those differences? A large language model isn't alive, but does it have a mind? Should we call what it does cognition? What are the relations between life, mind, cognition, intelligence, consciousness? Those kinds of questions. We even discuss why the famed octopus might be really intelligent but not conscious. Andrea Gambarotto Gambarotto papers Enactivism and the Hegelian stance on intrinsic purposiveness Body plan organization and the evolution of conscious agency Blog: Dialectical Systems Papers also mentioned Weber & Varela 2002: Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. Mossio & Bich 2014: What makes biological organisation teleological? Bechtel & Bich & 2021: Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology. Pessoa 2026: Beyond networks: Toward adaptive models of biological complexity. Levins 1998: Dialectics and Systems Theory. Barandiaran & Moreno 2006: On What Makes Certain Dynamical Systems Cognitive: A Minimally Cognitive Organization Program. Books mentioned Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language Radical Embodied Cognitive Science An Evolutionary Story of Agency 0:00 - Intro 7:51 - Intrinsic and extrinsic purposivene
- 2 weeks ago1h 36m
BI 245 Dan Levenstein: Neuro-AI, Dynamics, and Model Systems
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Daniel Levenstein started his NeuroAI and Dynamics Lab at Yale University about a year ago. We briefly discuss what it's like to transition from a postdoc to a principle investigator, i.e. head of the lab. But most mostly we discuss his work and ideas. Dan studies spontaneous neural activity during sleep, specially in brain areas like hippocampus and cortex, and how this internally generated spontaneous activity is related to learning and memory and navigation. Really, he used to study those processes directly through experimental brain recording datasets. These days he builds and studies models of those processes, using AI models and seeing how their dynamics and functions match what we see in brains. Levenstein Lab Related papers On the Role of Theory and Modeling in Neuroscience The problem-ladenness of theory Sequential predictive learning is a unifying theory for hippocampal representation and replay 0:00 - Intro 9:12 - Neuro-AI 18:23 - Experiment vs theory 20:36 - Ground vs active state neuron activity 25:38 - Beginning a lab 31:34 - Sleep and Internally generated activity 40:02 - Spiking neural networks 52:13 - Naturalistic neuro-AI 59:52 - Cognitive maps, world models 1:04:16 - Weasel words and motifs 1:08:17 - Transformers and brains 1:18:53 - AI vs biology 1:24:32 - Neuroscience theory
- Aug 19, 20261h 29m
BI 244 Marco Facchin: Philosophy and Science of Biological Brains
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Marco Facchin is a postdoctoral philosopher of neuroscience and cognitive sciences more broadly at the University of Antwerp. He and his colleague Farid Zahnoun recently hosted a workshop called Beyond Neuro-computationalism with themselves and a handful of speakers, almost all of whom have been on Brain Inspired. In that workshop, they discussed many topics around this sort of forever ongoing reassessment in neuroscience and philosophy about how best to think about cognition, the role of brains, embodied, enactive, embedded, extended - known together as 4E cognition - how much biological detail matters for a good explanation, and so on. The talks from that workshop are online, and I'll link to them in the show notes. So today Marco and I discuss how that all went, and many of the topics and themes I just mentioned, plus his own work and ideas along those lines. Marco Facchin Beyond neuro-computationalism talks. Why can’t we say what cognition is (at least for the time being) Predictive processing and anti-representationalism Defusing the Representation-Hungry Challenge Structural representations do not meet the job description challenge Structure and function in the predictive brain 0:00 - Intro 3:30 - Beyond neuro-computationalism 14:02 - Vicente Raja motifs 17:58 - 4E cognition 32:36 - Philosophy and neuroscience 42:18 - The problem with predictive processing 48:56 - Role of AI in understanding brains and minds 54:05 - Metabolic constraints 1:07:58 - A philosopher's view of neuroscience 1:13:27 - A-lieving and AI 1:25:47 - AI consciousness
- Aug 5, 20261h 40m
BI 243 Alison Barth: Learning as a Window to Cortex
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Alison Barth runs the Barth Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, where they use learning experiments in mice to try to figure out how the cortex works. As you may know, the brain in general but also the cortex itself is made up of a large variety neuron cell types, with different activity properties. Alison has the gritty job of identifying those different cell types in sensory cortex, and seeing how they change when animals learn to associate rewards with sensory stimulation. So unlike many of the guests, who take a much more zoomed out view and look at how populations of neurons carry out some function, Alison is happiest down at the cellular level. So we talk about her work, why she prefers to work at that scale, and a variety of related topics. Barth Lab. Related papers Barth lab publications. Learning, prediction accuracy, and neural plasticity in sensory cortex. 0:00 - Intro 4:24 - Alison's trajectory to learning and memory 21:02 - Automated mouse learning experiments 25:34 - What is success in this line of work? 32:34 - How many cell types do we need to explain? 34:33 - Current experiments 38:11 - How does cortex work? 45:19 - Predictive processing 1:02:01 - Obstacles 1:10:41 - Role of AI 1:33:38 - Moving forward
- Jul 15, 20261h 44m
BI 242 Kathryn Nave: How Life Gets its Meaning and Intelligence
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Kathryn Nave is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of the book A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life. In the book, Kate dives deep into the free energy principle and active inference, which are popular approaches to studying brains, minds, and organisms in general, and which are being used in artificial intelligence. Ultimately, Kate finds these approaches come up short as explanatory frameworks for life, and autonomy, and intelligence. Instead, Kate and many others advocate a framework that Kate calls constraint closure or closure of constraints, but also goes by the name organizational closure. This is a concept from philosophy and theoretical biology that people like Alvaro Moreno and Matteo Mossio have put forth in their 2015 book Biological Autonomy. The core ideas are also found in various forms from people like Robert Rosen, Stuart Kauffman, Alicia Juarrero, Terrence Deacon, and others. We discuss what constraint closure is, why Kate thinks it's a solid foundation to build on, and what if anything it means for cognitive science and brain sciences to embrace this constraint closure view. I highly recommend the book even if you're looking for a primer on the free energy principle and active inference. As we discuss, Kate's journalism experience has helped her become a wonderful communicator of these notoriously difficult concepts. Kathryn Nave @kathrynnave A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life Related episode: BI 241 Johannes Jaeger: Agency and the Cyborg Myth Mentioned in the episode: We Need To Rewild The Internet Beyond Control: Finding the Purpose of Enactive Cognitive Science 0:00 - Intro 5:39 - Journalism back to philosophy 15:56 - How Kate got into predictive processing etc. 21:30 - Predictive processing and phenomenology 30:45 - Organizational closure 37:37 - Constraint closure beyond the single cell 45:04 - Brain as metabolic 50:12 - Basal cognition 52:13 - Degeneracy 55:08 - Neutral networks 1:00:33 - AI and autonomy 1:08:12 - Meaning and mind 1:10:02 - Why do we need brains? 1:17:33 - Reframe neuroscience? 1:23:51 - Reifying models 1:27:43 - Free energy principle and active inference 1:37:16 - Tolerating as much variability as possible
- Jul 1, 20261h 37m
BI 241 Johannes Jaeger: Agency and the Cyborg Myth
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. Johannes Jaeger is Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. He's also a freelance researcher, a philosopher, and an educator. He's here today to educate us about some of the fundamental differences between living organisms and machines, like AI, and why we should care about those differences. We discuss his paper The Cyborg Myth, an argument for why we can't seamlessly replace ourselves with machine parts over time. We talk about judgment and relevance realization as a fundamental difference between AI and living organisms -the ability to judge what is a relevant problem to solve in the first place, assuming intelligence is about problem solving. We also discuss what agency is in living systems, and why AI agents are something completely different. I think you get the recurring theme here. Yogi is writing a book called Beyond the Age of Machines, a work in progress and you can read it as he writes it on his expanding possibilities website. Untethered in the Platonic Realm (Yogi's website) Expanding Possibilities Book in progress: Beyond the Age of Machines Mastadon: @yoginho 0:00 - Intro 7:11 - The cyborg myth 15:16 - Judgment 24:22 - Consciousness 28:56 - Agency 36:40 - Relevance realization and energy efficiency 46:44 - Metabolism as a metaphor 1:00:39 - Robert Rosen 1:06:20 - Conceptual engineering 1:12:55 - Dynamics and computation 1:23:07 - Agency book
- Jun 17, 20261h 42m
BI 240 Cristopher Moore: Cognition and Computational Complexity
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Cristopher Moore is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, and he is a computation and computational complexity expert. He recently joined a us in my complexity discussion group, and answered a bunch of our questions, but I wasn't done with him regarding what, if anything, computational complexity has to do understanding how brains and minds work. So that's why he's here today, and we discuss a wide variety of topics related to AI, computation, computational complexity, and cognition. Cris's Homepage Book: The Nature of Computation Related papers What Is a Macrostate? Subjective Observations and Objective Dynamics 0:00 - Intro 4:24 - The Nature of Computation 9:14 - Computational complexity 28:22 - Real mathematics 35:08 - Current state of AI 39:04 - Computational complexity in the AI world 47:53 - Cognition, creation, problems 56:16 - Rugged landscapes and generalization 1:13:52 - What is computation? 1:32:31 - How would you study the brain?
- Jun 3, 20261h 53m
BI 239 Nedah Nemati: Naturalistic Neuroscience and Lived Experience
Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. he Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Check out this story: Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org. Neuroscience studies in part the relation between brain activity and behaviors. But, what is a behavior? It's a simple question, but there's no simple answer. For example, you're behaving right now, whatever you're doing, even if you're not doing much. When you cross the street, how many behaviors do you use? When you sleep, what behaviors do you do? Hopefully these simple examples make you think about how difficult it can be call some single movement a behavior. Nedah Nemati is a philosopher of neuroscience at Columbia University. I met Nedah at a workshop a few months ago, where we chatted about the growing trend in neuroscience toward what is sometimes being called "naturalistic neuroscience," which really means varying levels of allowing organisms to behave more freely, less constrained, than traditional neuroscience experiments that seek to minimize unrelated to the behavior or cognition you want to isolate to study and explain. In more extreme cases, researches will try in the lab to emulate as much as possible the ecological world a particular organism has evolved to exist in, or even perform the experiments out of the lab, in the wild, so to speak. So a good part of our discussion revolves around this trend, and what counts as a "naturalistic" behavior, and how the tools we use to perform experiments shape the experiments and the scientific questions themselves. Nedah has a neuroscience background, but in her philosophical work she has embedded herself into various neuroscience labs to better understand how the experiences of the researchers themselves, called their lived experiences, shape the assumptions and questions in their science. As an example, we discuss her work looking into the neuroscience of sleep from over a 100 years ago to today. When a modern neuroscientist studies sleep, are they studying the same thing a scientist claimed to be studying 100 years ago, even though they claimed to be studying sleep back then as well? Nedah's website. Transmitter piece: Beyond the algorithmic oracle: Rethinking machine learning in behavioral neuroscience Related papers Rethinking Neuroscientific Methodology: Lived Experience in Behavioral Studies What is ‘Natural’ about Naturalistic Neuroscience? 0:00 - Intro 5:00 - Philosopher in a lab 20:21 - Sleep as behavior 22:22 - How the study of "sleep" has changed 27:24 - How tools and methods shape definitions 46:07 - Naturalistic neuroscience 1:00:47 - Naturalistic vs experimental 1:14:32 - How tools change theory 1:16:57 - Lived experience 1:26:28 - Lived experience vs. bias 1:37:09 - AI and engineering in neuroscience 1:45:29 - Should a lab hire a philosopher?
Get Brain Inspired summaries in your inbox
Free AI-powered daily recaps. Key takeaways, quotes, and mentions — in a 5-minute read.
Get Free Summaries →Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
You Might Also Like
Listeners also like.
"The Cognitive Revolution"
Interviews with AI developers and researchers exploring the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on society and technology.
Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
Explores AI engineering breakthroughs in foundation models, code generation, and AI agents through interviews with researchers and developers.
AI and I
Interviews with professionals who use AI tools in their work, exploring how AI affects creativity, thinking, and daily life through live demonstrations.
Consciousness and the Brain
Neuroscientist Bernard Baars and guests explore the science of consciousness and the brain, focusing on Global Workspace Theory.
Brain Science with Ginger Campbell, MD: Neuroscience for Everyone
Explores neuroscience discoveries and how the brain shapes human identity through interviews and book discussions.
Artificial Intelligence Masterclass
Examines the impact of advanced artificial intelligence on ethics, society, and the future of human labor.
The Neuron: AI Explained
A weekly deep dive into artificial intelligence, breaking down complex developments and research into clear, accessible insights.
The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis
A daily analysis of artificial intelligence news, exploring its creative potential, industry impacts, and ethical challenges.
OpenAI Podcast
Conversations with OpenAI researchers and builders exploring how frontier AI models are developed and used in practice.
How I AI
A practical guide to using AI tools in work and life, featuring guests who share specific, actionable techniques and workflows.
Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman
Neuroscientist David Eagleman examines how the brain interprets reality through science, stories, and interviews.
NVIDIA AI Podcast
Explores how artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are driving innovation across science, sustainability, and industry.
About 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.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from Brain Inspired in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's Brain Inspired daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Brain Inspired as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Brain Inspired podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Brain Inspired product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Paul Middlebrooks.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Brain Inspired release new episodes?
Brain Inspired publishes biweekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Brain Inspired cover?
Brain Inspired covers topics including Science, Technology, Education, Natural Sciences. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Brain Inspired summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.