Unsupervised Thinking

Cerebellum literally means "little brain," and in a way, it has been treated as a second-class citizen in neuroscience f... Read more

Working memory is the ability to keep something in mind several seconds after it's gone. Neurons don't tend to keep firi... Read more

From worms to flies, and mice to macaques, neuroscientists study a range (but not very large range...) of animals when t... Read more

Despite the fact that the brain is full of them, glial cells don't get much attention from neuroscientists. The traditio... Read more

As scientists, we throw around words like "explanation" a lot. We assume explaining stuff is part of what we're doing wh... Read more

Reinforcement learning is important for understanding behavior because it tells us how actions are guided by reward. But... Read more

In 2002, cancer biologist Yuri Lazebnik raised and addressed the semi-facetious question "Can a biologist fix a radio?" ... Read more

This very special episode of Unsupervised Thinking takes place entirely at the IBRO-Simons Computational Neuroscience Im... Read more

In part two of our conversation on what counts as an explanation in science, we pickup with special guest David Barack g... Read more

For decades, neuroscientists have explored the ways in which neurons update and control the strength of their connection... Read more

In the past few years, we've noticed researchers making more explicit efforts to engage with scientists in other countri... Read more

Machine learning has been making big strides in a lot of straightforward tasks, such as taking an image and labeling the... Read more

Because of the sheer number of neurons in the gut, the enteric nervous system is sometimes called the second brain. What... Read more

You may have heard of predictive coding; it's a theory that gets around. In fact, it's been used to understand everythin... Read more

There is a tension when it comes to the study of behavior in neuroscience. On the one hand, we would love to understand ... Read more

On this unique episode of Unsupervised Thinking, we talk not about a particular area of science, but about the process o... Read more

Sleep is such a ubiquitous part of our lives we may forget just how weird of a thing it is to spend a third of our days ... Read more

In the late 19th century, many of the most basic foundations of neuroscience were laid, but not without a fight. In this... Read more

In the second part of our discussion on the concept of coding, we get into specific examples of what could count as the ... Read more

The concept of "coding," along with language referencing it, is abundant in neuroscience whether describing sensory syst... Read more