Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Vicente Raja on how concepts from Gibson's ecological psychology can inform modern neuroscience
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/223
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
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.
Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, where he is also part of the Minimal Intelligence Lab run by Paco Cavo, where they study plant behavior, and he is external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. He is a philosopher, and he is a cognitive scientist, and he specializes in applying concepts from ecological psychology to understand how brains, and organisms, including plants, get about in the world.
We talk about many facets of his research, both philosophical and scientific, and maybe the best way to describe the conversation is a tour among many of the concepts in ecological psychology - like affordances, ecological information, direct perception, and resonance, and how those concepts do and don't, and should or shouldn’t, contribute to our understanding of brains and minds.
We also discuss Vicente's use of the term motif to describe scientific concepts that allow different researches to study roughly the same things even though they have different definitions for those things, and toward the end we touch on his work studying plant behavior. It's all related, as you'll see.
0:00 - Intro
4:55 - Affordances and neuroscience
13:46 - Motifs
39:41- Reconciling neuroscience and ecological psychology
1:07:55 - Predictive processing
1:15:32 - Resonance
1:23:00 - Biggest holes in ecological psychology
1:29:50 - Plant cognition
Vicente Raja on how concepts from Gibson's ecological psychology can inform modern neuroscience
Show notes: braininspired.co/podcast/223
Patreon (full episodes, archive, Discord, more): patreon.com/braininspired
Apple podcasts: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/brain-inspired/id1428880766?mt=2
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2UZj8c8Ap5oc2gh2rJxLLe
Music by @dunovank
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.
Vicente Raja is a research fellow at University of Murcia in Spain, where he is also part of the Minimal Intelligence Lab run by Paco Cavo, where they study plant behavior, and he is external affiliate faculty of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University. He is a philosopher, and he is a cognitive scientist, and he specializes in applying concepts from ecological psychology to understand how brains, and organisms, including plants, get about in the world.
We talk about many facets of his research, both philosophical and scientific, and maybe the best way to describe the conversation is a tour among many of the concepts in ecological psychology - like affordances, ecological information, direct perception, and resonance, and how those concepts do and don't, and should or shouldn’t, contribute to our understanding of brains and minds.
We also discuss Vicente's use of the term motif to describe scientific concepts that allow different researches to study roughly the same things even though they have different definitions for those things, and toward the end we touch on his work studying plant behavior. It's all related, as you'll see.
0:00 - Intro
4:55 - Affordances and neuroscience
13:46 - Motifs
39:41- Reconciling neuroscience and ecological psychology
1:07:55 - Predictive processing
1:15:32 - Resonance
1:23:00 - Biggest holes in ecological psychology
1:29:50 - Plant cognition
