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Brain InspiredWhere Neuroscience and AI Converge Author: 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 in learning more about neuroscience and AI. Language: en-us Genres: Natural Sciences, Science, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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BI 239 Nedah Nemati: Naturalistic Neuroscience and Lived Experience
Tuesday, 2 June, 2026
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?
