87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy

87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy

If you tell me that one of the world's leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin and nature of life more broadly, and uses concepts of entropy and information in a central way — well, you know I'm going to be all over that. So it's my great pleasure to present this conversation with Karl Friston, who has done exactly that. One of the most highly-cited neuroscientists now living, Friston has proposed that we understand the brain in terms of a free energy principle, according to which our brains are attempting to model the world in such a way as to minimize the amount of surprise we experience. It's a bit more complicate than that, but I think we made great headway in explicating some very profound ideas in a way that should be generally understandable.

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Karl Friston received his medical degree from King's College Hospital, London. He is currently Professor at the Institute of Neurology, University College London, and Wellcome Principal Research Fellow and Scientific Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging. Among his major contributions are statistical parametric mapping, voxel-based morphometry, and dynamical causal modeling. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the Academy of Medical Science, and of the Royal Society of Biology. Among his awards are the Young Investigators Award in Human Brain Mapping, the Minerva Golden Brain Award, the Weldon Memorial Prize, the Charles Branch Award, and the Glass Brain Award for human brain mapping.


Jaksot(415)

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291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging

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290 | Hahrie Han on Making Multicultural Democracy Work

290 | Hahrie Han on Making Multicultural Democracy Work

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289 | Cari Cesarotti on the Next Generation of Particle Experiments

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As an experimental facility, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva has been extraordinarily successful, discovering the Higgs boson and measuring multiple features of particle-physics interactio...

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288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today

288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today

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AMA | September 2024

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287 | Jean-Paul Faguet on Institutions and the Legacy of History

287 | Jean-Paul Faguet on Institutions and the Legacy of History

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286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation

286 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas on the Emergence of Replication and Computation

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285 | Nate Silver on Prediction, Risk, and Rationality

285 | Nate Silver on Prediction, Risk, and Rationality

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