BI Brain Inspired

Podcast

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,...

Website ↗ Last published 4 November 2026 164 posts collected by Sputnik

Said on Brain Inspired

“Reinforcement learning is at the core of these large language models, because they do reinforcement learning from human feedback. … They try to please you too much. They won't tell you if you're wrong or something.” — Michael Cole, Brain Inspired
Michael Cole · 4 Nov 2026 Listen →
“We literally have a study from a couple of years back showing that you can generate face selectivity in the fusiform face area from other regions, just based on the flows to the face area. So the computation isn't inside. It's probably some, but most of the computation is from other regions.” — Michael Cole, Brain Inspired
Michael Cole · 4 Nov 2026 Listen →
“Current AI is kind of untethered relative to how our brains work, in the sense that they don't have a proper global flow hierarchy. Our global flow hierarchy is grounded at the bottom by perception-action cycles. We're embodied, and that's important for preventing what's called hallucinations. And at the top we have core values that shape our goal pursuits.” — Michael Cole, Brain Inspired
Michael Cole · 4 Nov 2026 Listen →
“Can we reduce everything to solving a bunch of tasks? I think this is actually kind of detrimental to almost any aspect of life and culture that today's artificial intelligence companies touch. They reduce it all to this morass of quantification and list of tasks.” — Maxim Raginsky, Brain Inspired
Maxim Raginsky · 7 Oct 2026 Listen →

Hosts

Brain Inspired is hosted by Paul Middlebrooks and Paul Niddelbrooks .

Recent Episodes

  1. 4 Nov 2026

    BI 249 Michael Cole: Brain Flows are the Units of Cognition

    With Michael Cole

  2. 21 Oct 2026

    BI 248 Andrea Hiott: The Navigational Approach to the Mind

    With Andrea Hiott

  3. 7 Oct 2026

    BI 247 Maxim Raginsky: A Control Theory View on Brains and AI

    With Maxim Raginsky

  4. 16 Sep 2026

    BI 246 Andrea Gambarotto: Cognition Requires Agency

    With Andrea Gambarotto

  5. 2 Sep 2026

    BI 245 Dan Levenstein: Neuro-AI, Dynamics, and Model Systems

    With Daniel Levenstein

  6. 19 Aug 2026

    BI 244 Marco Facchin: Philosophy and Science of Biological Brains

    With Marco Facchin

  7. 5 Aug 2026

    BI 243 Alison Barth: Learning as a Window to Cortex

    With Alison Barth

  8. 15 Jul 2026

    BI 242 Kathryn Nave: How Life Gets its Meaning and Intelligence

    With Kathryn Nave

  9. 1 Jul 2026

    BI 241 Johannes Jaeger: Agency and the Cyborg Myth

    With Johannes Jaeger

  10. 17 Jun 2026

    BI 240 Cristopher Moore: Cognition and Computational Complexity

    With Cristopher Moore

  11. 3 Jun 2026

    BI 239 Nedah Nemati: Naturalistic Neuroscience and Lived Experience

    With Nedah Nemati

  12. 20 May 2026

    BI 238 James Harrison: Hypnosis as Mental Foraging

    With James Harrison

Guests

John Krakauer (9 episodes), Konrad Kording (7 episodes), Andrew Saxe (6 episodes), Steve Potter (6 episodes), Grace Lindsay (5 episodes), David Poeppel (5 episodes), Paul Cisek (5 episodes), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga (5 episodes), Brad Love (5 episodes), Mazviita Chirimuuta (5 episodes), Talia Konkle (5 episodes), Marcel van Gerven (5 episodes), and 218 more.