This week on Unpopular Neuroscience, Katie and Patrick welcome special guest Matt Baumann with a deep question from his son, Calvin. When a slug remembers something, is it reliving the experience, or…
Large attentional transformers like ChatGPT generate text that seems surprisingly human-like. On this episode Katie and Patrick ask which bits of the brain work like large language models, which bits…
Neuroscientists don't believe in Artificial General Intelligence because they don't believe in General Intelligence. Instead they think the brain has multiple, specialized systems that work together…
What is consciousness? To the general public it's one of the most profound and enduring mysteries of the human psyche. To specialists it's something we don't worry about much. In this episode, Katie…
On this episode Katie & Patrick discuss why cognitive biases are so popular—at least when applied to other people—even though these reasoning foibles are not exclusive to humans, probably not caused…
Everyone knows that learning takes hard work, deep reading, study, and repeated practice. But wouldn't it be rad if it didn't? On this episode Katie and Patrick talk about the science of learning and…
AI oscillates between impressive breakthroughs and laughable failures. In this episode Katie & Patrick discuss AI booms and winters and what makes the technology so brittle. What can AI learn from…
What's so great about having a "normal" brain? Katie & Patrick discuss a trio of patients from Oliver Sacks' iconic book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat who have adapted to unusual…
We sometimes talk about "the brain" as if there's only one of them, but there's tremendous diversity in nervous systems between species, and even between individuals. On this episode of Unpopular…
How hard is it to build a working, thinking brain from simple parts like wires, sensors, and motors? According to Valentino Braitenberg, author of this week's Book Vehicles, it's actually easier to…
