Podcast
Audio research news
Your latest update from The Transmitter, an essential resource for the neuroscience community, dedicated to helping scientists at all career stages stay current and build connections. Read more: https://www.thetransmitter.org/
- Episodes
- 304
- Releases
- Twice a week
- Typical length
- 8 min
- On air since
- 2022
- Latest episode
- 1 week ago
Episodes
304 episodes, newest first
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9 min
Remembering Barbara Finlay, 'maverick' of evolutionary neuroscience
Show notes
Finlay, who died on 12 September, championed the idea that developmental constraints dictate how evolution sculpts brains, a concept she used to model the timing of hundreds of events and align them across mammalian species.
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9 min
What to do when traditional mechanistic approaches no longer work
Show notes
Many complex behaviors have stubbornly resisted mechanistic explanations. Deciphering them will require new approaches-and perhaps a new concept of "understanding."
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6 min
How new technologies can bring primatologists and systems neuroscientists together
Show notes
The two groups study the same behavioral phenomena yet rarely interact or read each other's work-a mutual blind spot that weakens both fields. New technologies offer a chance to bring them together.
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7 min
Creating community through grant support
Show notes
Fiona Sanderson, a senior program manager at the Brain Canada Foundation, shares how she got into grant administration and how she helps connect researchers with funding and one another.
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3 min
This paper changed my life: A first glimpse into the 'middle' of brain processing
Show notes
Work by Jeffrey Moran and Robert Desimone showed that monkeys could focus their attention on different stimuli in their visual field without shifting their gaze. Their work marked a key milestone in the emergence of cognitive neuroscience.
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8 min
The neural code at 100
Show notes
In two 1926 articles, Edgar Douglas Adrian revealed that neurons communicate through trains of spikes.
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6 min
What AI can learn from hunger
Show notes
To enhance AI safety, take a lesson from biological brains; a small set of wants maintains durable control over a much larger cognitive system.
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6 min
How the pipa frog hunts prey by touch
Show notes
Each of the frog's eight fingers branches into 16 ultra-sensitive tips, which together function as a fovea-potentially the first demonstration of this type of sensory structure outside of mammals.
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8 min
Revisiting the neural correlates of consciousness
Show notes
Life happens in real time, but experience may be composed in ragtime-like the music genre, full of offbeat notes and uneven rhythms. The assumption that waking life consists of a "stream" of conscious representations has inadvertently led consciousness science to its current impasse.
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6 min
Grant review needs reform. How about we add an element of chance?
Show notes
A process that uses a lottery system saves time, reduces strategic resubmission and accepts that, above a quality threshold, luck has always played a part in science funding.
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7 min
This paper changed my life: Transformative work in addiction neuroscience
Show notes
A 2011 Nature study found that loss of a nicotinic receptor subunit leads to increased nicotine intake in mice. The work set the standard for how to functionally validate genetic association study findings in neuroscience.
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8 min
Building brain-computer interfaces at a neurotech company
Show notes
At Blackrock Neurotech, Spencer Kellis develops implantable devices that help people with brain and spinal cord conditions communicate, move and more.
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7 min
Infant memories: Lost but not gone?
Show notes
Infantile amnesia is not simply a story about forgetting the past. It is an opportunity to understand how memory itself is built.
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8 min
Neuromechanical models deepen our understanding of animal motor control
Show notes
Thanks to recent progress in physics-based simulators and robotics, it has never been easier for neuroscientists to use neuromechanical modeling to test hypotheses about animal movement.
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9 min
Dimensionality-neuroscience's red herring?
Show notes
Placing too much emphasis on a specific interpretation of dimensionality, or treating it as an end-all quantification of some aspect of neural computation, may hinder progress in understanding the brain.
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5 min
Inside the sea cucumber's regenerative superpowers
Show notes
José E. García-Arrarás studies how these marine invertebrates manage to regrow their nervous system, intestines and other internal organs in a matter of months after threats prompt them to literally spill their guts.
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8 min
How FALAN is building a thriving neuroscience community in Latin America
Show notes
As the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies Congress kicks off next week, its president shares how the organization aims to foster collaborations and provide high-quality training for young neuroscientists in the region.
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8 min
How, when and why to use agentic AI in our neuroscience labs
Show notes
With agentic AI's rapid infiltration into science, researchers need to develop AI use policies and practices.
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9 min
Climate neuroscience needs 'integration' and 'guided' research
Show notes
Five years after a groundbreaking paper, can a young field move beyond piecemeal studies?
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5 min
Brainstem neurons add new element to 'already complex' anxiety circuitry
Show notes
Precise optogenetic modulation of a medullary neuron population reveals their role in anxiety-like behaviors.
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