Ep.12. Why AI Tells You What You Want to Hear
What happens when the AI adviser you trust most is also the one most willing to take your side?In this episode, I examine a 2026 Science paper on social sycophancy—the tendency of AI systems to affirm...
18 Aug 26min
Ep.11. The Planning Machine
Paper discussedTaylor Webb, Shanka Subhra Mondal & Ida Momennejad (2025). A brain-inspired agentic architecture to improve planning with LLMs. Nature Communications.One-sentence summaryThis episode ex...
6 Juli 30min
Ep.10. The Adaptive Machine
Paper discussedMackenzie Mathis. Leveraging insights from neuroscience to build adaptive artificial intelligence. Nature Neuroscience, 2026.One-sentence summaryThis episode explores how neuroscience c...
15 Juni 33min
Ep.09. The Sound of Thought
PaperDenk, T. I., Takagi, Y., Matsuyama, T., Agostinelli, A., Nakai, T., Frank, C., & Nishimoto, S. Text-to-music generation models capture musical semantic representations in the human brain. Nature ...
8 Juni 30min
Ep.08. The Clock That was Never There
Paper: Buzsáki, G. (2025). Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 27, 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00987-2Key concepts: Physical time (chronos), experien...
25 Maj 27min
Ep.07. The Body Keeps the Beat
Paper: Engelen, T., Solcà, M., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2023). Interoceptive rhythms in the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 26, 1670–1684. Key concepts: Interoception, heartbeat-evoked response (HER), heartbe...
18 Maj 29min
Ep.06. The Wandering Mind
What is the brain doing when attention drifts away from the task at hand?This episode explores a 2024 Nature Communications study linking hippocampal sharp-wave ripples to naturally occurring self-gen...
25 Apr 21min
Ep.05. The Inference Engine
A rat freezes to a tone it was never shocked with. It learned that the tone predicted a light, and separately that the light predicted a shock, and its brain built the rest. This is inferred fear: emo...
18 Apr 21min
