BI 180 Panel Discussion: Long-term Memory Encoding and Connectome Decoding @braininspired

Uploaded December 2023 | Updated September 2026, 12 hours ago

Show notes:
braininspired.co/podcast/180

Patreon for full episodes and Discord community:
patreon.com/braininspired

Video Series: Open Questions in AI and Neuroscience:
braininspired.co/open

Apple podcasts:
itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify:
open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe

Music by: The New Year:
thenewyear.net

Welcome to another special panel discussion episode.
I was recently invited to moderate at discussion amongst 6 people at the annual Aspirational Neuroscience meetup. Aspirational Neuroscience is a nonprofit community run by Kenneth Hayworth. Ken has been on the podcast before on episode 103. Ken helps me introduce the meetup and panel discussion for a few minutes. The goal in general was to discuss how current and developing neuroscience technologies might be used to decode a nontrivial memory from a static connectome - what the obstacles are, how to surmount those obstacles, and so on.
There isn't video of the event, just audio, and because we were all sharing microphones and they were being passed around, you'll hear some microphone type noise along the way - but I did my best to optimize the audio quality, and it turned out mostly quite listenable I believe.

0:00 - Intro
1:45 - Ken Hayworth
14:09 - Panel Discussion

BI 180 Panel Discussion: Long-term Memory Encoding and Connectome Decoding

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$BI 191 Damian Kelty-Stephen: Fractal Turbulent Cascading Intelligence Show notes: https://braininspired.co/podcast/191/ Patreon for full episodes and Discord community: https://www.patreon.com/braininspired Video Series: Open Questions in AI and Neuroscience: https://braininspired.co/open/ Apple podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe Music by: The New Year: http://www.thenewyear.net/ Damian Kelty-Stephen is an experimental psychologist at State University of New York at New Paltz. Last episode with Luis Favela, we discussed many of the ideas from ecological psychology, and how Louie is trying to reconcile those principles with those of neuroscience. In this episode, Damian and I in some ways continue that discussion, because Damian is also interested in unifying principles of ecological psychology and neuroscience. However, he is approaching it from a different perspective that Louie. What drew me originally to Damian was a paper he put together with a bunch of authors offering their own alternatives to the computer metaphor of the brain, which has come to dominate neuroscience. And we discuss that some, and Ill link to the paper in the show notes. But mostly we discuss Damians work studying the fractal structure of our behaviors, connecting that structure across scales, and linking it to how our brains and bodies interact to produce our behaviors. Along the way, we talk about his interests in cascades dynamics and turbulence to also explain our intelligence and behaviors. So, I hope you enjoy this alternative slice into thinking about how we think and move in our bodies and in the world. 0:00 - Intro 2:34 - Damians background 9:02 - Brains 12:56 - Do neuroscientists have it all wrong? 16:56 - Fractals everywhere 28:01 - Fractality, causality, and cascades 32:01 - Cascade instability as a metaphor for the brain 40:43 - Damians worldview 46:09 - What is AI missing? 54:26 - Turbulence 1:01:02 - Intelligence without fractals? Multifractality 1:10:28 - Ergodicity 1:19:16 - Fractality, intelligence, life 1:23:24 - Whats exciting, changing viewpoints$

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