Unsupervised Thinking

For our 5th episode, we get into braaaiiiiinnnwaaaaaavessss. By which we mean neural oscillations. By which we really mean a lot of different things it turns out. For this, we bring in special guest Nancy Padilla, who actually puts electrodes into animals to study these things. We define the vocabulary of the field and then Nancy tells us how she uses these measurements for her own work. Then with the help of this paper, we get into what we think can reasonably be concluded from extracellular-oscillation style studies, and the seemingly seductive nature of oscillations to explain everything. All throughout you're gonna hear a lot about LFPs (local field potentials), including Conor's lament about their undefinable nature. And Josh is going to demand that Nancy explain how oscillations could be of use to us computational types. Finally we wrap up with a bit of redemption and common ground, surrounding this paper on "ephaptic coupling".

As you may have heard, there's been a lot of talk about something called deep learning lately. So for our fourth episode, we and our special guest, Ryan Tombacco, are taking a deep dive into deep learning! We give broad overviews of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and the historical foundations of deep learning and then we get into some nitty gritty examples of what deep learning can do today. All throughout Ryan uses his podcast-ready voice to ask some really insightful questions, and we end up musing on the relationships between deep learning and the brain along with some philosophy of learning (Josh even brings up Kant...)

For our second episode, we break down BCI. We'll go over what signals in the brain are used to interface with computers and how. Included is some constrained optimism about how well these devices can perform and where the limitations come from. Our focus is mostly on motor interfaces (prosthetic arms, for example), though we touch on other applications.

For our first episode, we discuss the Blue Brain project, or as it is now known, the Human Brain Project. The focus of this project is to understand the brain by simulating it in extreme detail. We go into the history of the project, the politics, and the science of it, including what it even means to "simulate the brain in extreme detail."

The connectome--a silly word and a somewhat simple concept that has caused significant debate amongst neuroscientists worldwide. In this episode, we teach the controversy surrounding the big C. First, we trudge through a definition of the connectome (it means different things to different people, but generally centers on mapping out what's connected to what in the brain), and methods used to obtain it. We then talk about what we've learned from the only animal for which we have the full connectome: the worm C. elegans. Then, via a comparison to the Human Genome Project (inspiration for the word "connectome"), we ask whether neuroscientists believe it's worth the money and the collective effort of the field to pursue the connectome in other animals. This leads us onto a tangent regarding how the public views neuroscience and whether it's morally acceptable to oversell work in order to gain funding. Ultimately, we end in a state of uncertainty, much like the field of neuroscience itself.