Neuroscience needs evolution

Biology, Physics, Chemistry. 23/09/10

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This is a conversation with Paul Cisek, professor of neuroscience at the university of montreal. His research mainly focuses on how the brain controls behaviour. In this conversation we talk about why modern neuroscience needs evolution, contribution of psychology to neuroscience, brain as a computer, and what does modern AI is lacking?


About the guest

  • 00:00:00 Introduction

  • 00:00:52 Meaning of understanding the brain

  • 00:03:18 Focus of modern neuroscience

  • 00:05:34 Contribution of psychology to neuroscience

  • 00:09:38 Getting rid of anthropocentric ideas

  • 00:12:07 Is brain like a computer?

  • 00:27:03 Brain as a control system

  • 00:36:03 Paul's analogy for the brain

  • 00:42:41 Feedback loops in simple organisms

  • 00:47:57 Evolution of neurotransmitters

  • 00:57:40 Importance of competition for the evolution of neural system

  • 01:04:49 Retaining advantageous phenotypes

  • 01:06:41 Advantages of evolutionary processes

  • 01:14:51 Expansion of the brain

  • 01:22:02 Composition in the cortical columns

  • 01:25:04 Topology changes during evolution

  • 01:40:48 Phylogenetic refinement

  • 01:57:53 How many times brain evolved independently?

  • 02:03:29 Variations regarding neural system

  • 02:05:37 Does size matter?

  • 02:12:33 How robust is the classification of the regions in the brain?

  • 02:15:09 Paul's favorite models to study brain

  • 02:21:21 Stimulating a worm

  • 02:25:14 Using evolution to understand cognition, intelligence etc

  • 02:34:11 In which sense humans are different?

  • 02:36:04 Filling the gap of evolutionary data

  • 02:37:19 Reproducing extinct species

  • 02:38:42 Further reading

  • 02:41:02 Thank you!

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