Evolving Skills in Theoretical Neuroscience @braininspired

Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago

Ann Kennedy on where there is room to grow for theoretical neuroscience

🎧 Full episode here: youtube.com/watch?v=bmlVSnKXkxQ
💡 More at braininspired.co

#theory #neuroscience #academia

Evolving Skills in Theoretical Neuroscience

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

BI 226 Tatiana Engel: The High and Low Dimensional Brain

BI 167 Panayiota Poirazi: AI Brains Need Dendrites

BI 216 Woodrow Shew and Keith Hengen: The Nature of Brain Criticality

BI 140 Jeff Schall: Decisions and Eye Movements

BI 240 Cristopher Moore: Cognition and Computational Complexity

$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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