From Our Neurons to Yours
This award-winning show from Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute is a field manual for anyone who wants to understand their own brain and the new science reshaping how we learn, age, heal, and make sense of ourselves.
Each episode, host Nicholas Weiler sits down with leading scientists to unpack big ideas from the frontiers of the field—brain-computer interfaces and AI language models; new therapies for depression, dementia, and stroke; the mysteries of perception and memory; even the debate over free will. You’ll hear how basic research becomes clinical insight and how emerging tech might expand what it means to be human. If you’ve got a brain, take a listen.
From Our Neurons to Yours
Big Ideas: How see-through brains could transform neuroscience | Guosong Hong
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What if we could make the brain see-through?
It sounds like science fiction, but it could revolutionize how we study the brain.
Today on the show, we're talking with Guosong Hong, a faculty scholar here at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute who has a unique reputation for developing creative techniques that literally shed light on the brain—from using fluorescent nanomaterials and focused ultrasound to create a virtual flashlight inside the skull, to discovering a common food dye that temporarily makes skin, muscle, and even parts of the brain transparent.
Now, Guosong and colleagues are taking this work to the next level through a Wu Tsai Neuro Big Ideas grant, genetically engineering mice to have see-through brains from birth.
Learn More
- Q&A: 'To see is to believe' (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
- Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
- Researchers turn mouse scalp transparent to image brain development (Stanford Report, 2026)
- The future of transparent tissue (Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything Podcast, 2025)
- Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
- Researchers make mouse skin transparent using a common food dye (Stanford Report, 2024)
Note: Episode transcript will be uploaded within 24-48 hours of publication
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