Uploaded December 2024 | Updated September 2026, 6 hours ago
Grace Hwang and Joe Monaco discuss the future of the interaction between neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Show notes:
braininspired.co/podcast/200
Patreon (full episodes and Discord community:
patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: thetransmitter.org/newsletters
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Joe Monaco and Grace Hwang co-organized a recent workshop I participated in, the 2024 BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop. You may have heard of the BRAIN Initiative, but in case not, BRAIN is is huge funding effort across many agencies, one of which is the National Institutes of Health, where this recent workshop was held. The BRAIN Initiative began in 2013 under the Obama administration, with the goal to support developing technologies to help understand the human brain, so we can cure brain based diseases.
So it just became a decade old, with many successes like recent whole brain connectomes, and discovering the vast array of cell types. Now the question is how to move forward, and one area they are curious about, that perhaps has a lot of potential to support their mission, is the recent convergence of neuroscience and AI... or NeuroAI. So the workshop was designed to explore how NeuroAI might contribute moving forward, and to hear from NeuroAI folks how they envision the field moving forward. You'll hear more about that in a moment.
That's one reason I invited Grace and Joe on. Another reason is because they co-wrote a position paper a while back that is impressive as a synthesis of lots of cognitive sciences concepts, but also proposes a specific level of abstraction and scale in brain processes that may serve as a base layer for computation. The paper is called Neurodynamical Computing at the Information Boundaries, of Intelligent Systems, and you'll learn more about that in this episode.
0:00 - Intro
25:45 - NeuroAI Workshop - neuromorphics
33:31 - Neuromorphics and theory
49:19 - Reflections on the workshop
54:22 - Neurodynamical computing and information boundaries
1:01:04 - Perceptual control theory
1:08:56 - Digital twins and neural foundation models
1:14:02 - Base layer of computation
Grace Hwang and Joe Monaco discuss the future of the interaction between neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
Show notes:
braininspired.co/podcast/200
Patreon (full episodes and Discord community:
patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.
Read more about our partnership: thetransmitter.org/partners
Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released: thetransmitter.org/newsletters
To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.
Joe Monaco and Grace Hwang co-organized a recent workshop I participated in, the 2024 BRAIN NeuroAI Workshop. You may have heard of the BRAIN Initiative, but in case not, BRAIN is is huge funding effort across many agencies, one of which is the National Institutes of Health, where this recent workshop was held. The BRAIN Initiative began in 2013 under the Obama administration, with the goal to support developing technologies to help understand the human brain, so we can cure brain based diseases.
So it just became a decade old, with many successes like recent whole brain connectomes, and discovering the vast array of cell types. Now the question is how to move forward, and one area they are curious about, that perhaps has a lot of potential to support their mission, is the recent convergence of neuroscience and AI... or NeuroAI. So the workshop was designed to explore how NeuroAI might contribute moving forward, and to hear from NeuroAI folks how they envision the field moving forward. You'll hear more about that in a moment.
That's one reason I invited Grace and Joe on. Another reason is because they co-wrote a position paper a while back that is impressive as a synthesis of lots of cognitive sciences concepts, but also proposes a specific level of abstraction and scale in brain processes that may serve as a base layer for computation. The paper is called Neurodynamical Computing at the Information Boundaries, of Intelligent Systems, and you'll learn more about that in this episode.
0:00 - Intro
25:45 - NeuroAI Workshop - neuromorphics
33:31 - Neuromorphics and theory
49:19 - Reflections on the workshop
54:22 - Neurodynamical computing and information boundaries
1:01:04 - Perceptual control theory
1:08:56 - Digital twins and neural foundation models
1:14:02 - Base layer of computation
