Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas9 Maalis 2020

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.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(427)

183 | Michael Dine on Supersymmetry, Anthropics, and the Future of Particle Physics

Modern particle physics is a victim of its own success. We have extremely good theories — so good that it's hard to know exactly how to move beyond them, since they agree with all the experiments. Yet...

7 Helmi 20221h 39min

182 | Sally Haslanger on Social Construction and Critical Theory

Reality is just out there — but how we perceive reality and talk about it depends on choices we human beings make. We decide (consciously or not) to conceptualize the world in certain ways, whether it...

31 Tammi 20221h 37min

181 | Peter Dodds on Quantifying the Shape of Stories

A good story takes you on an emotional journey, with ups and downs along the way. Thanks to science, we can quantify that. Peter Dodds works on understanding the structure of stories and other strings...

24 Tammi 20221h 16min

180 | Camilla Pang on Instructions for Being Human

Being a human is tricky. There are any number of unwritten rules and social cues that we have to learn as we go, but that we ultimately learn to take for granted. Camilla Pang, who was diagnosed with ...

17 Tammi 20221h 3min

179 | David Reich on Genetics and Ancient Humanity

Human beings like to divide themselves into groups, and then cooperate, socialize, and reproduce with members of their own group. But they're not very absolutist about it; groups tend to gradually (or...

10 Tammi 20221h 13min

178 | Jody Azzouni on What Is and Isn't Real

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can't kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There's surely a kind of reality th...

3 Tammi 20221h 14min

Holiday Message 2021 | On Disciplines & Cocktails

As each December comes to a close, we wrap up another year of podcasts with the Mindscape Holiday Message. Nothing too profound, just some thoughts that wouldn't fit easily into a regular podcast. Thi...

20 Joulu 202159min

AMA | December 2021

Welcome to the December 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of qu...

15 Joulu 20213h 37min