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From Our Neurons to Yours

Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, Nicholas Weiler

62 episodes

2 days ago

In this episode, we explore the fascinating neuroscience behind how children learn to read with Bruce McCandliss, director of the Stanford Educational Neuroscience Initiative. Key topics include: • How our brains "recycle" visual and language circuits to create reading expertise • The crucial threshold when reading shifts from effortful to automatic • Why some children struggle more than others to develop reading fluency • How teachers can tailor instruction to help struggling readers • The p...

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Health & Fitness,

All content for From Our Neurons to Yours is the property of Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University, Nicholas Weiler and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.

In this episode, we explore the fascinating neuroscience behind how children learn to read with Bruce McCandliss, director of the Stanford Educational Neuroscience Initiative. Key topics include: • How our brains "recycle" visual and language circuits to create reading expertise • The crucial threshold when reading shifts from effortful to automatic • Why some children struggle more than others to develop reading fluency • How teachers can tailor instruction to help struggling readers • The p...

Show more...

Health & Fitness,

Episodes (20/62)

From Our Neurons to Yours

Best of: How neural prosthetics could free minds trapped by brain injury | Jaimie Henderson

Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries. We're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the archives: our 2024 conversation with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological...

3 weeks ago

22 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

The secrets of resilient aging | Beth Mormino & Anthony Wagner

This week on the show, we're have our sights set on healthy aging. What would it mean to be able to live to 80, 90 or 100 with our cognitive abilities intact and able to maintain an independent lifestyle right to the end of our days? We're joined by Beth Mormino and Anthony Wagner who lead the Stanford Aging and Memory Study, which recruits cognitively healthy older adults to understand what makes their brains particularly resilient — and how more of us could join them in living the dre...

1 month ago

36 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Building AI simulations of the human brain | Dan Yamins

This week on the show: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain? Last month, Stanford researcher Andreas Tolias and colleagues created a "digital twin" of the mouse visual cortex. The researchers used the same foundation model approach that powers ChatGPT, but instead of training the model on text, the team trained in on brain activity recorded while mice watched action movies. The result? A digital model that can predict how neurons would respond to entirely new visual ...

1 month ago

32 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

What ChatGPT understands: Large language models and the neuroscience of meaning | Laura Gwilliams

If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word. But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human...

2 months ago

42 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

What the other half of the brain does | Brad Zuchero

We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia science was founded here at Stanford in the lab of the late, great Ben Barres. No one is better suited to take us through th...

2 months ago

35 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Stimulating the brain with sound | Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan

As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve. Today we're going to be talking with neuroscientists who aim to solve this problem with sound. And not ...

3 months ago

30 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Does good sleep insulate the brain against Alzheimer's? | Erin Gibson

We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease. To unpack this complex relationship, we're thrilled to welcome back Erin Gibson, assis...

3 months ago

39 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

How to live in a world without free will | Robert Sapolsky

Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament." In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and ...

6 months ago

40 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

The power of psychedelics meets the power of placebo: ketamine, opioids, and hope in depression treatment | Boris Heifets & Theresa Lii

Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression.We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelics trial? What do we know about how placebo actually works in the brain? And should we view the placebo ...

7 months ago

35 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Seeing sounds, tasting colors: the science of synaesthesia with David Eagleman (re-release)

Today, we are going back into the archives for one of my favorite episodes: We are talking to neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, David Eagleman. We're talking about synaesthesia — and if you don't know what that is, you're about to find out.Special NoteWe are beyond thrilled that From Our Neurons to Yours has won a 2024 Signal Award in the Science Podcast category. It's a big honor — thanks to everyone who voted!---Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about t...

7 months ago

21 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

The BRAIN Initiative: the national vision for the future of neuroscience is now in doubt | Bill Newsome

Earlier this year, President Obama's signature BRAIN Initiative, which has powered advances in neuroscience for the past 10 years, had its budget slashed by 40%. Over the past decade, the BRAIN Initiative made roughly $4 billion in targeted investments in more than 1500 research projects across the country and has dramatically accelerated progress tackling fundamental challenges in neuroscience. As we head into the next federal budget cycle, the future of the initiative remains uncertain...

8 months ago

39 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

The cannabinoids within: how marijuana hijacks an ancient signaling system in the brain | Ivan Soltesz

Given the widespread legalization of cannabis for medical and recreational uses, you'd think we'd have a better understanding of how it works. But ask a neuroscientist exactly how cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD alter our perceptions or lead to potential medical benefits, and you'll soon learn just how little we know.We know that these molecules hijack an ancient signaling system in the brain called the "endocannabinoid" system (translation: the "cannabinoids within"). These somewhat e...

8 months ago

37 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Memory Palaces: the science of mental time travel and the brain's GPS system | Lisa Giocomo (Re-release)

Today we are re-releasing an episode we did last year with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo exploring the intersection of memory, navigation and the boundaries we create between ourselves and the world around us.This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can ...

9 months ago

25 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Why new Alzheimer's drugs don't work | Mike Greicius, Stanford University School of Medicine

In the past few years, Big Pharma has released not one, but three new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Aducanemab (2021), Lecanemab (2023), and Donanemab (2024), are the first treatments to effectively clear the brain of amyloid plaques — the sticky protein clumps whose build-up in the brain has defined the disease for decades. The problem? They may not help patients at all.Today’s guest, Stanford neurologist Mike Greicius, considers the new amyloid-clearing drugs a major disappointment — ...

9 months ago

25 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Depression's distinctive fingerprints in the brain | Leanne Williams, Stanford University

Getting help for depression can be like purgatory. Setting aside for a moment the stigma and other barriers to seeking treatment in the first place, finding the right combination of medication and/or therapy can be a months- or years-long process of trial and error. And for about one third of people, nothing seems to work.Today we're talking with Dr. Leanne Williams, the founding director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness and Vincent V.C. Woo Professor in the Sta...

9 months ago

28 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

How the brain helps cancers grow | Michelle Monje

Today, we're talking with Stanford neuro-oncologist, Michelle Monje. This is actually the third time we've had Michelle on the show, in part because she's been a pioneer of three exciting frontiers in neuroscience — so far! This week, we're going to talk about cancer neuroscience. Michelle founded this new field with her discovery that deadly brain tumors not only link up physically with the healthy brain tissue surrounding them, but the cancers actually need the brain's electrical activ...

10 months ago

21 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Unraveling Timothy Syndrome: the new science of human brain development | Sergiu Pasca

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about using new techniques for growing human brain tissue in the lab to solve a rare neurological disorder.Host Nicholas Weiler sits down with Sergiu Pasca an innovative Stanford scientist who has developed groundbreaking technologies to grow human brain tissue in the lab, creating "organoids" and "assembloids" that model brain disorders like autism and schizophrenia. Pasca describes the process of turning patient skin cells into embr...

10 months ago

30 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

How VR could help treat depression with "radical behaviorist" Dr. Kim Bullock

Today, we're going to talk about virtual reality and how it could be used to treat depression. We're talking with psychiatrist Kim Bullock, the founding director of Stanford's Neurobehavioral Clinic and Virtual Reality & Immersive Technologies (VRIT) program. Dr. Bullock — a physician certified in Neuropsychiatry, Psychiatry, and Lifestyle Medicine — calls herself a "radical behaviorist." Like other practitioners of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), she sees the troublesome thought...

11 months ago

21 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

Electronic skin and the future of wearable technology | Zhenan Bao

The skin is full of contradictions. It’s soft and sensitive, but also tough and resilient, even self-healing. It’s both the barrier that protects us from infections and our most intimate connection with the outside world. Today’s guest, Zhenan Bao, has spent the last two decades reverse engineering the skin’s many remarkable properties in order to create wearable electronics that are just as soft, flexible, and versatile as the skin itself.Bao envisions a world where stick-on devices cou...

11 months ago

23 minutes

From Our Neurons to Yours

How a new kind of brain plasticity could help make sense of addiction | Michelle Monje and Rob Malenka

This week, we're diving into recent research that sheds light on a new form of brain plasticity involving changes in the insulation of nerve fibers — called myelin. It turns out that myelin plasticity is implicated in a number of serious conditions, from epilepsy to drug abuse and addiction.We're excited to bring back two previous guests on the show to share their insights on this previously unknown form of plasticity: Stanford psychiatry professor Rob Malenka (S1 E1 - Psychedelic...

1 year ago

22 minutes