66 Episodes

  1. "Why Brains Need Friends: The Neuroscience of Social Connection" | Ben Rein

    Published: 10/16/2025

  2. From doodles to Descartes: sketching and the human cognitive toolkit | Judith Fan

    Published: 10/2/2025

  3. What is psychosis? Navigating an altered reality | Jacob Ballon & Shannon Pagdon

    Published: 9/18/2025

  4. "I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine" | Daniel Levitin

    Published: 9/4/2025

  5. How we learn to read (and why some struggle): what neuroscience teaches us about a transformative human technology | Bruce McCandliss

    Published: 8/21/2025

  6. Why voices light us up—but leave the autistic brain in the dark | Dan Abrams

    Published: 8/7/2025

  7. Famous & Gravy: Cosmic Marketer and the Meaning of Life | Stephen Hawking

    Published: 7/24/2025

  8. Can brain science save addiction policy? | Keith Humphreys

    Published: 7/10/2025

  9. How basic science transformed stroke care | Marion Buckwalter

    Published: 6/26/2025

  10. Surgery as a window into brain resilience | Martin Angst

    Published: 6/12/2025

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

    Published: 5/29/2025

  12. The secrets of resilient aging | Beth Mormino & Anthony Wagner

    Published: 5/15/2025

  13. Building AI simulations of the human brain | Dan Yamins

    Published: 5/1/2025

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

    Published: 4/17/2025

  15. What the other half of the brain does | Brad Zuchero

    Published: 4/3/2025

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

    Published: 3/20/2025

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

    Published: 3/6/2025

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

    Published: 12/5/2024

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

    Published: 11/21/2024

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

    Published: 11/7/2024

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This award-winning show from Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute is a field manual for anyone who wants to understand their own brain and the new science reshaping how we learn, age, heal, and make sense of ourselves.Each episode, host Nicholas Weiler sits down with leading scientists to unpack big ideas from the frontiers of the field—brain-computer interfaces and AI language models; new therapies for depression, dementia, and stroke; the mysteries of perception and memory; even the debate over free will. You’ll hear how basic research becomes clinical insight and how emerging tech might expand what it means to be human. If you’ve got a brain, take a listen.