Brain Inspired

Hakwan, Steve, and I discuss many issues around the scientific study of consciousness. Steve and Hakwan focus on higher order theories (HOTs) of consciousness, related to metacognition. So we discuss HOTs in particular and their relation to other approac

Brian and I discuss a range of topics related to his latest book, The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values. The alignment problem asks how we can build AI that does what we want it to do, as opposed to building AI that will compromise our

Omri, David and I discuss using recurrent neural network models (RNNs) to understand brains and brain function. Omri and David both use dynamical systems theory (DST) to describe how RNNs solve tasks, and to compare the dynamical stucture/landscape/skele

K, Josh, and I were postdocs together in Jeff Schalls and Geoff Woodmans labs. K and Josh had backgrounds in psychology and were getting their first experience with neurophysiology, recording single neuron activity in awake behaving primates. This episod

Its generally agreed machine learning and AI provide neuroscience with tools for analysis and theoretical principles to test in brains, but there is less agreement about what neuroscience can provide AI. Should computer scientists and engineers care abou

Alison and I discuss her work to accelerate learning and thus improve AI by studying how children learn, as Alan Turing suggested in his famous 1950 paper. The ways children learn are via imitation, by learning abstract causal models, and active learning

Dileep and I discuss his theoretical account of how the thalamus and cortex work together to implement visual inference. We talked previously about his Recursive Cortical Network (RCN) approach to visual inference, which is a probabilistic graph model th

Russ and I discuss cognitive ontologies - the parts of the mind and their relations - as an ongoing dilemma of how to map onto each other what we know about brains and what we know about minds. We talk about whether we have the right ontology now, how he

Carsen and I discuss how she uses 2-photon calcium imaging data from over 10,000 neurons to understand the information processing of such large neural population activity. We talk about the tools she makes and uses to analyze the data, and the type of hi

Chris and I discuss his Spaun large scale model of the human brain (Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network), as detailed in his book How to Build a Brain. We talk about his philosophical approach, how Spaun compares to Randy OReillys Leabra networ