Imagine if you couldn't distinguish between dreams and reality. If you couldn't tell whether what you were seeing or hearing was really there in front of you. What if you discovered you couldn't trust your own perceptions? 

Psychosis is something three out of every a hundred people will experience at some point in their lifetimes. But what exactly is it, and is it something people can learn to live with?

Today we're fortunate to have on the show Dr. Jacob Ballon, the founding co-director of Stanford Medicine's Inspire Clinic, and Shannon Pagdon, a doctoral student, peer counselor, and advocate for those living with psychosis.

Learn More:

• Learn about the Inspire 360 Program at Stanford Medicine
• Explore Pagdon's Psychosis Outside the Box project and additional stories of the lived experience of psychosis from the Hearing Voices Network
• Read: "Psychosis 101: Unmasking one of the brain's most mysterious Malfunctions" (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• Watch: "Demystifying Psychosis" (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• Read: "Two key brain systems are central to psychosis, Stanford Medicine-led study finds" (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• Watch: "Schizophrenia: Early signs and treatment options" (Stanford Center for Health Education, 2022)

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Most of us can agree: music is awesome. Regardless of which songs speak to you, music probably plays an important role in your life. The question is, what makes music so powerful? Why does a particular combination of sounds and rhythms grab us and affect us in the way that it does? And is it true that music can help heal patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, PTSD, chronic pain, and more? 

To help us understand what we're learning about the neuroscience of music and how it can heal and enrich our lives, we're speaking with Daniel Levitin. He's a musician and a producer as well as a neuroscientist and bestselling author. His newest book is "I Heard There was a Secret Chord: Music As Medicine." 

Learn More:

• "I Heard There Was a Secret Chord" playlist
• Menon, V., & Levitin, D. J. (2005). The rewards of music listening: Response and connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage.
• Menon, V. (2023). 20 years of the default mode network: A review and synthesis. Neuron.
• Salimpoor, V. N., et al. (2013). Interactions between the nucleus accumbens and auditory cortices predict music’s reward value. Science.
• Wang, L., Peng, J.-l., et al. (2022). Effects of rhythmic auditory stimulation on gait and motor function in Parkinson’s disease: Systematic review & meta-analysis. Frontiers in Neurology.
• Zumbansen, A., et al. (2014). Melodic Intonation Therapy: Back to basics for future research. Frontiers in Neurology.
• Moreno-Morales et al. (2020). Music therapy in the treatment of dementia: Systematic review & meta-analysis. Frontiers in Medicine.
• Allen, E. J., et al. (2017). Representations of pitch and timbre variation in human auditory cortex. Journal of Neuroscience.
• Sonos/Apple “Music Makes It Home” study (2016). "This Speaker Company Says Music Makes You Happier." Time Magazine.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In this episode, we explore the fascinating neuroscience behind how children learn to read with Bruce McCandliss, director of the Stanford Educational Neuroscience Initiative.

Key topics include:
• How our brains "recycle" visual and language circuits to create reading expertise
• The crucial threshold when reading shifts from effortful to automatic
• Why some children struggle more than others to develop reading fluency
• How teachers can tailor instruction to help struggling readers
• The profound ways literacy reshapes our brains and cognition

Join us  for a mind-expanding look at one of humanity's most transformative technologies - written language - and how mastering it quite literally changes our brains.

Learn More

• Learn about the Stanford Educational Neuroscience Initiative at Stanford's Graduate School of Education
• Learn about the "brainwave learning center" at Menlo Park's Synapse School.
• Watch McCandliss present his work at Wu Tsai Neuro's 10th anniversary Symposium

Recent Academic Articles & News Coverage

• Tan LH, Perfetti CA, Ziegler JC, McCandliss B. "Editorial: Neural bases of reading acquisition and reading disability." Frontiers in Neuroscience (2023).
  
  This editorial highlights advances in the neuroscience of reading, focusing on the brain mechanisms underlying reading development and disabilities. The authors summarize key themes across international research, including neuroimaging insights and educational applications.
  
  
• Stanford News. "Stanford-led study links school environment to brain development" (2024) 
  
  Researchers found that children who attend higher-performing schools have accelerated white matter development, including in an area of the brain closely associated with reading skills.
  
  
• Stanford News. "Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development" (2015)
  
  Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss found that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Recognizing a familiar voice is one of the brain’s earliest social feats. But what are the brain circuits that let a newborn pick out mom in a crowded nursery? How do they change as kids turn toward friends and the wider world? And what are we learning about why this instinct fails to develop in the autistic brain?

This week, host Nicholas Weiler joins Stanford neuroscientist Dan Abrams on the quest to understand the neural “hub” that links our brains' hearing centers to the networks that tag voices as rewarding, social, and worth our attention. The findings could reshape early-intervention strategies for kids on the spectrum.

Learn More

• Stanford Speech and Social Neuroscience Lab
  • Participate in a Study
  • Community Support Resources
• Publications
  • Underconnectivity between voice-selective cortex and reward circuitry in children with autism (PNAS, 2013) 
  • Neural circuits underlying mother’s voice perception predict social communication abilities in children (PNAS, 2016) 
  • Impaired voice processing in reward and salience circuits predicts social communication in children with autism (eLife, 2019) 
  •  A Neurodevelopmental Shift in Reward Circuitry from Mother's to Nonfamilial Voices in Adolescence (Journal of Neuroscience, 2022)
• Stanford Coverage
  • "The teen brain tunes in less to Mom's voice, more to unfamiliar voices, study finds" (Stanford Medicine, 2022)
  • "Brain wiring explains why autism hinders grasp of vocal emotion, says Stanford Medicine study" (Stanford Medicine, 2023)

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In this special crossover episode, we’re doing something a little different. From Our Neurons to Yours host Nicholas joins producer Michael Osborne to co-host his podcast Famous and Gravy for a lively conversation about the extraordinary life and mind of Stephen Hawking.

Hawking, one of the most renowned scientists of our time, lived with ALS for more than 50 years—defying medical expectations while also reshaping how we understand black holes, the universe, and our place within it. While Hawking wasn’t a neuroscientist, his neurological condition and his remarkable communication of complex ideas make his story especially relevant to From Our Neurons to Yours.

In this episode, we explore:

• How Hawking’s life with ALS shaped his outlook and scientific drive
• His talent for making theoretical physics accessible (and entertaining)
• Big philosophical questions about the universe and the nature of existence
• The intersection of science, celebrity, and personal legacy

We hope you enjoy this crossover conversation.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If addiction is a disease of the brain, what does that mean for how we treat people—and how we write policy? In this wide-ranging conversation, Stanford addiction expert and policy advisor Keith Humphreys returns to the show to walk us through what neuroscience has taught us about substance use disorders and how that science intersects with law, public health, and politics.

From the biology of craving to the limits of autonomy, we explore the tension between compassion and accountability, and what truly effective treatment and prevention might look like.

Episode Highlights

• Why addiction isn’t just a moral failure—and how brain science explains drug-seeking behavior
• The biological pathways affected by opioids, alcohol, and stimulants—and why some drugs are harder to treat
• What makes some people more vulnerable to addiction than others
• Why effective addiction policy must account for impaired decision-making
• How policy can—and can’t—respond to the science
• The promise and limitations of brain stimulation, psychedelics, and medications like naloxone
• Why prevention—especially for teens—is key to long-term change
• What a more human, effective, and science-based future could look like

Resources & Links

• Learn more about Keith Humphreys
• Learn about the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy
• Read about the NeuroChoice Initiative at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
• NIH resources on addiction science and treatment
• Read Humphreys' 2024 report on "The rise and fall of Pacific Northwest drug policy reform, 2020–2024" (Brookings Institution, 2024)
• Read about CARE Courts ( "New California Court for the Mentally Ill Tests a State’s Liberal Values", New York Times, 2024)
• Read Humphreys' 2025 Op-Ed: "Does harm reduction still have a future in San Francisco?" (SF Chronicle, 2025)
• Read a policy summary, "Blue states change course on mental health policies" (Axios, 2025)

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

A generation ago, a big clot in the brain meant paralysis or worse. Today, doctors can diagnose clots on AI-enabled brain scans; provide life-saving, targeted medications; or snake a catheter from a patient’s groin into the brain to vacuum out the clot. If they intervene in time, they can watch speech and movement return before the sedatives wear off. How did that happen—and what’s still missing?

In this episode of From Our Neurons to Yours, Stanford neuroscientist and neurocritical care specialist Marion Buckwalter, MD, PhD retraces the 70-year chain of curiosity-driven research—biochemistry, imaging, materials science, AI—behind today’s remarkable improvements in stroke care. She also warns what future breakthroughs are at stake if support for basic science stalls.

Learn More

Buckwalter Lab site

History of Stroke Care:

• Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Acute Ischemic Stroke (NINDS) On the development of the first-gen clot-busting drug, tPA 
• Optimizing endovascular therapy for ischemic stroke (NINDS) On the development of mechanical clot clearance using thrombectomy.
• Mechanical Thrombectomy for Large Ischemic Stroke (Neurology, 2023) A literature meta-analysis shows that thrombectomy improves stroke outcomes by 2.5X, on top of 2X improvements from clot-busting drugs

The uncertain future of federal support for science

• The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant (New York Times, 2025)
• Trump Has Cut Science Funding to Its Lowest Level in Decades (New York Times, 2025)

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu or... 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We've all heard stories about someone who went in for surgery and came out...different. A grandmother who struggled with names after hip replacement, or an uncle who seemed foggy for months following cardiac bypass. But why does this happen to some people while others bounce right back?

This week, we explore this question with Dr. Martin Angst, a professor of anesthesiology at Stanford who's studying the biological factors that determine cognitive outcomes after surgery. With support from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, Martin and his team are following hundreds of cardiac surgery patients, tracking everything from blood biomarkers to cognitive performance both before and after their procedures.

Their findings are revealing fascinating insights about what makes some brains more resilient than others when faced with the significant stress of major surgery - insights that could help physicians better advise patients and potentially lead to interventions that enhance resilience.

Read More

• Under the Lights: What Surgery Reveals About Brain Resilience (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
• Infusion of young donor plasma components in older patients modifies the immune and inflammatory response to surgical tissue injury: a randomized clinical trial (Journal of Translational Medicine, 2025)
• Blood test predicts recovery after hip-replacement surgery, study finds (Stanford Medicine, 2021)
• Can major surgery increase risk for Alzheimer's disease? (Stanford Medicine, 2021)
• Plasma Biomarkers of Tau and Neurodegeneration During Major Cardiac and Noncardiac Surgery (JAMA Neurology, 2021)

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Iniative for Brain Resilience.

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Imagine being trapped in your own body, unable to move or communicate effectively. This may seem like a nightmare, but it is a reality for many people living with brain or spinal cord injuries.

We're re-releasing one of our favorite episodes from the archives: our 2024 conversation with Jaimie Henderson, a Stanford neurosurgeon leading groundbreaking research in brain-machine interfaces. Henderson shares how multiple types of brain implants are currently being developed to treat neurological disorders and restore communication for those who have lost the ability to speak.

We also discuss the legacy of the late Krishna Shenoy and his transformative work in this field.

Learn more
Henderson's Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab

BrainGate Consortium – "Turning thought into action"

‘Unprecedented’ level of control allows person without use of limbs to operate virtual quadcopter (University of Michigan, 2025)

Brain Implants Helped 5 People Recover From Traumatic Injuries (New York Times, 2023)

The man who controls computers with his mind (New York Times Magazine, 2022)

Software turns ‘mental handwriting’ into on-screen words, sentences (Stanford Medicine, 2021)

• Related video: Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2021
• Related publication: Nature, 2021

Learn about the work of the late Krishna Shenoy

Krishna V. Shenoy (1968–2023) (Nature Neuroscience, 2023)

Krishna Shenoy, engineer who reimagined how the brain makes the body move, dies at 54 (Stanford Engineering, 2023)

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Iniative for Brain Resilience.

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This week on the show, we're have our sights set on healthy aging. What would it mean to be able to live to 80, 90 or 100 with our cognitive abilities intact and able to maintain an independent lifestyle right to the end of our days? 

We're joined by Beth Mormino and Anthony Wagner who lead the Stanford Aging and Memory Study, which recruits cognitively healthy older adults to understand what makes their brains particularly resilient — and how more of us could join them in living the dream of healthy aging.

Learn More

• Stanford Aging and Memory Study (SAMS)
• Stanford Memory Lab
• Mormino Lab

Further Reading

• Alzheimer's 'resilience signature' predicts who will develop dementia—and how fast (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
• Latest Alzheimer's lab tests focus on memory loss, not brain plaques (NPR, 2025)

References

• Trelle, A. N., ... & Wagner, A. D. (2020). Hippocampal and cortical mechanisms at retrieval explain variability in episodic remembering in older adults. eLife, 9:e55335. doi: 10.7554/eLife.55335 PDF | PMID:32469308
• Trelle, A. N., ..., Wagner, A. D., Mormino, E. C., & Wilson, E. N. (2025). Plasma Aβ42/Aβ40 is sensitive to early cerebral amyloid accumulation and predicts risk of cognitive decline across the Alzheimer’s disease spectrum. Alzheimer’s & Dementia, 21:e14442. PDF | PMID:39713875
• Sheng, J., ..., Mormino, E., & Wagner, A. D. (submitted). Top-down attention and Alzheimer's pathology impact cortical selectivity during learning, influencing episodic memory in older adults.  Preprint

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Iniative for Brain Resilience.

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener r

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This week on the show: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain? 

Last month, Stanford researcher Andreas Tolias and colleagues created a "digital twin" of the mouse visual cortex. The researchers used the same foundation model approach that powers ChatGPT, but instead of training the model on text, the team trained in on brain activity recorded while mice watched action movies. The result? A digital model that can predict how neurons would respond to entirely new visual inputs. 

This landmark study is a preview of the unprecedented research possibilities made possible by foundation models of the brain—models which replicate the fundamental algorithms of brain activity, but can be studied with complete control and replicated across hundreds of laboratories.

But it raises a profound question: Are we ready to create digital models of the human brain? 

This week we talk with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Dan Yamins, who has been exploring just this question with a broad range of Stanford colleagues and collaborators. We talk about what such human brain simulations might look like, how they would work, and what they might teach us about the fundamental algorithms of perception and cognition.

Learn more

AI models of the brain could serve as 'digital twins' in research (Stanford Medicine, 2025)

An Advance in Brain Research That Was Once Considered Impossible (New York Times, 2025)

The co-evolution of neuroscience and AI (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

How Artificial Neural Networks Help Us Understand Neural Networks in the Human Brain (Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), 2021)

Related research

A Task-Optimized Neural Network Replicates Human Auditory Behavior... (PNAS, 2014)

Vector-based navigation using grid-like representations in artificial agents (Nature, 2018)

The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing (PNAS, 2021)

Using deep reinforcement learning to reveal how the brain encodes abstract state-space representations... (Neuron, 2021) 

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

If you spend any time chatting with a modern AI chatbot, you've probably been amazed at just how human it sounds, how much it feels like you're talking to a real person. Much ink has been spilled explaining how these systems are not actually conversing, not actually understanding — they're statistical algorithms trained to predict the next likely word. 

But today on the show, let's flip our perspective on this. What if instead of thinking about how these algorithms are not like the human brain, we talked about how similar they are? What if we could use these large language models to help us understand how our own brains process language to extract meaning? 

There's no one better positioned to take us through this than returning guest Laura Gwilliams, a faculty scholar at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science Institute, and a member of the department of psychology here at Stanford.

Learn more:

Gwilliams' Laboratory of Speech Neuroscience

Fireside chat on AI and Neuroscience at Wu Tsai Neuro's 2024 Symposium (video)

The co-evolution of neuroscience and AI (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)

How we understand each other (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)

Q&A: On the frontiers of speech science (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)

Computational Architecture of Speech Comprehension in the Human Brain (Annual Review of Linguistics, 2025)

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain (PMC Preprint, 2025)

Behind the Scenes segment:

By re-creating neural pathway in dish, Sergiu Pasca's research may speed pain treatment (Stanford Medicine, 2025)

Bridging nature and nurture: The brain's flexible foundation from birth (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with sound design by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We've talked about glia and sleep. We've talked about glia and neuroinflammation. We've talked about glia in the brain fog that can accompany COVID or chemotherapy. We've talked about the brain's quiet majority of non–neuronal cells in so many different contexts that it felt like it was high time for us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. After all, glia science was founded here at Stanford in the lab of the late, great Ben Barres.

No one is better suited to take us through this history and lead us to the frontiers of the field than today's guest, Brad Zuchero. 

A former Barres lab postdoc, and now an emerging leader in this field in his own right, Brad gives us an overview of our growing understanding of the various different kinds of glia and their roles in brain function, and shares the  exciting  discoveries emerging from his lab — including growing evidence of a role for myelin in Alzheimers disease.

Learn More

• Neuroscientist Ben Barres, who identified crucial roles of glial cells, dies at 63 (Stanford Medicine, 2017)
• How exciting! Study reveals neurons rely on glial cells to become electrically excitable (Stanford Neurosurgery, 2024)
• Unlocking the secrets of myelin repair (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
• Q&A: Linking sleep, brain insulation, and neurological disease with postdoc Daniela Rojo (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
• From angel to demon: Why some brain cells go ‘bad’ (Scope Blog, 2021)

Get in touch

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

As we gain a better understanding of how misfiring brain circuits lead to mental health conditions, we'd like to be able to go in and nudge those circuits back into balance. But this is hard — literally — because the brain is encased in this thick bony skull. Plus, often the problem you want to target is buried deep in the middle of a maze of delicate brain tissue you need to preserve.

Today we're going to be talking with neuroscientists who aim to solve this problem with sound. And not just any sound: ultrasound.

Kim Butts Pauly and Raag Airan from the Stanford Department of Radiology are developing ultrasound technology in a couple of different ways to essentially reach into the brain to treat brain disorders that are otherwise hard to access. These uses of ultrasound haven't yet reached the clinic, but could be entering clinical testing in people in the next few years. 

Mentioned on the Show

• Meet the 2025 Neurosciences Postdoctoral Scholars (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
• Butts Pauly Lab
• Airan Lab
• Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
• Advancing Brain Resilience: 2024 Catalyst and Pilot Grant Awards (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
• Researchers find response to ketamine depends on opioid pathways, but varies by sex (Stanford Medicine)
• A New Focused Ultrasound Neuromodulation System for Preclinical Brain Research (Focused Ultrasound Foundation, 2024)
• Translating Neuroscience Advances into Real World Uses (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)

Get in touch
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

We're kicking off our new season with a deep dive into one of neuroscience's most fascinating mysteries: sleep. This unconscious third of our lives isn't just about rest – it's absolutely critical for brain health, memory consolidation, and overall well-being. But here's where it gets intriguing: recent research suggests that increased napping as we age might be an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease.

To unpack this complex relationship, we're thrilled to welcome back Erin Gibson, assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford School of Medicine and Wu Tsai Neuro affiliate. 

We'll explore whether age-related sleep changes are potential contributors to brain degeneration or valuable early indicators of otherwise invisible brain disorders, possibly opening doors for early intervention.

We'll also learn about Gibson's research, supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro, which investigates how myelin—the insulation of our nerve cells—could be a key missing link in understanding the relationship between sleep and brain health.

Join us for an enlightening discussion that might just change how you think about your nightly slumber and its profound impact on long-term cognitive function. 

Mentioned on the Show

• Dopamine and serotonin work in opposition to shape learning
• Gibson Lab at Stanford University School of Medicine
• Surprising finding links sleep, brain insulation, and neurodegeneration | Knight Initiative
• Extended napping in seniors may signal dementia | UCSF

Related Episodes

• Respect your Biological Clock | Erin Gibson
• Why sleep keeps us young | Luis de Lecea
• Why new Alzheimer's drugs don't work | Mike Greicius

Get in touch
We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out with some listener research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker and research assistance by G Kumar. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and supported in part by the

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today, we are speaking with the one and only Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford neurobiologist, a MacArthur "Genius", and best-selling author of books exploring the nature of stress, social behavior, and — as he puts it — "the biology of the human predicament."

In his latest book, Determined, Sapolsky assertively lays out his vision of a world without free will — a world where as much as we feel like we're making decisions, the reality is that our choices are completely determined by biological and environmental factors outside of our control.

Before we get into it, it's worth saying that where this is heading, the reason to care about this question is that Sapolsky's argument has profound moral implications for our understanding of justice, personal responsibility, and whether any of us deserve to be judged or praised for our actions.

Mentioned on the Show

• Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Sapolsky, 2023)
• Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Sapolsky, 2018 )
• A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons (Sapolsky, 2002)
• Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Mitchell, 2023) 
• Sapolsky / Mitchell Debates – Part 1 (2023), Part 2 (2024)

Related Episodes

• Is addiction a disease? | Keith Humphreys
• Brain stimulation & "psychiatry 3.0" | Nolan Williams
• How we understand each other | Laura Gwilliams

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Join us as we dive back into the world of psychedelic medicine with anesthesiologists Boris Heifets and Theresa Lii, who share intriguing new data that sheds light on how ketamine and placebo effects may interact in treating depression.

We explore provocative questions like: How much of ketamine's antidepressant effect comes from the drug itself versus the excitement of being in a psychedelics trial? What do we know about how placebo actually works in the brain? And should we view the placebo effect as a feature rather than a bug in psychiatric treatment?

Join us as we examine the complex interplay between psychoactive drugs, the brain's own opioid system, and the healing power of hope in mental health care.

Related research

• Preprint: Opioids Diminish the Placebo Antidepressant Response: A Post Hoc Analysis of a Randomized Controlled Ketamine Trial (medRxiv, 2024)
• Randomized trial of ketamine masked by surgical anesthesia in patients with depression (Nature Mental Health, 2023)
  
  

Related episodes

• Psychedelics, placebo, and anesthetic dreams | Boris Heifets (Part 1) 
• Psychedelics Inside Out: How do LSD and psilocybin alter perception? | Boris Heifets (Part 2)
• OCD and Ketamine | Carolyn Rodriguez
• Psychedelics and Empathy: Why are psychiatrists taking a fresh look at MDMA? | Rob Malenka

Related news

• Researchers find response to ketamine depends on opioid pathways, but varies by sex (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• The rebirth of psychedelic medicine (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2023)
• Can Psychedelic Drugs Treat Physical Pain? (Scientific American, 2022)
• Scientists Say A Mind-Bending Rhythm In The Brain Can Act Like Ketamine (NPR, 2020)

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nichola

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today, we are going back into the archives for one of my favorite episodes: We are talking to neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and best-selling author, David Eagleman. We're talking about synaesthesia — and if you don't know what that is, you're about to find out.

Special Note
We are beyond thrilled that From Our Neurons to Yours has won a 2024 Signal Award in the Science Podcast category. It's a big honor — thanks to everyone who voted!

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Imagine Thursday. Does Thursday have a color? What about the sound of rain — does that sound taste like chocolate? Or does the sound of a saxophone feel triangular to you? 

For about 3% of the population, the sharp lines between our senses blend together. Textures may have tastes, sounds, shapes, numbers may have colors. This sensory crosstalk is called synesthesia, and it's not a disorder, just a different way of experiencing the world. 

To learn about the neuroscience behind this fascinating phenomenon and what it tells us about how our brains perceive the world, we were fortunate enough to speak with David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, author, and entrepreneur here at Stanford who has long been fascinated by synesthesia and what it means about how our perceptions shape our reality.

Links

• Livewired (book)
• Incognito (book)
• Wednesday Is Indigo Blue (book)
• Neosensory (website)
• Synesthete.org (website)
• Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman (podcast)

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Earlier this year, President Obama's signature BRAIN Initiative, which has powered advances in neuroscience for the past 10 years, had its budget slashed by 40%. 

Over the past decade, the BRAIN Initiative made roughly $4 billion in targeted investments in more than 1500 research projects across the country and has dramatically accelerated progress tackling fundamental challenges in neuroscience. As we head into the next federal budget cycle, the future of the initiative remains uncertain. 

Today we take stock of how the BRAIN Initiative transformed neuroscience over the past 10 years, and what the outlook is for the future of the field.

To give us an unparalleled behind the scenes view, we are fortunate to have Bill Newsome with us on the show. A world renowned expert in the brain mechanisms of visual perception and decision-making, Bill co-chaired the original BRAIN Initiative planning committee in 2013 (the same year he became the founding director of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute here at Stanford). Don't miss this conversation!

Learn More

• About the BRAIN Initiative 
  • NIH BRAIN Initiative website
  • A Leader of Obama's New Brain Initiative Explains Why We Need It (WIRED, April 2013)
  • BRAIN @ 10: A decade of innovation (Neuron, Sept 2024)
  • Reflecting on a decade of BRAIN—10 Institutes and Centers, one mission (NIH BRAIN Blog, Aug 2024)
    
    
• About last year's funding cuts: 
  • Understanding the BRAIN Initiative budget (NIH BRAIN Initiative)
  • $278 million cut in BRAIN Initiative funding leaves neuroscientists in limbo (The Transmitter, April 2024)
  • The Future of BRAIN Initiative Funding Remains Unclear (The Transmitter, July 2024)

Get in touch
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Given the widespread legalization of cannabis for medical and recreational uses, you'd think we'd have a better understanding of how it works. But ask a neuroscientist exactly how cannabinoid compounds like THC and CBD alter our perceptions or lead to potential medical benefits, and you'll soon learn just how little we know.

We know that these molecules hijack an ancient signaling system in the brain called the "endocannabinoid" system (translation: the "cannabinoids within"). These somewhat exotic signaling molecules (made of fatty lipids and traveling "backwards" compared to other transmitters) have been deeply mysterious until recently, when new tools made it possible to visualize their activity directly in the brain.

So what is the "day job" of the endocannabinoid system — and how does it connect to the dramatic highs that come with taking THC or the medical benefits of CBD? 

To unpack all this, we're talking this week with neuroscientist Ivan Soltesz, the James Doty Professor of Neurosurgery and Neuroscience at Stanford, and a leading expert on the endocannabinoid system.

Learn More

• The Soltesz Lab
• "Weeding out bad waves: towards selective cannabinoid circuit control in epilepsy" (Soltesz et al, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2015) 
• "Keep off the grass? Cannabis, cognition and addiction" (Parsons et al, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2016)
• "Marijuana-like brain substance calms seizures but increases aftereffects, study finds" (Goldman, Stanford Medicine News, 2021)
• "Retrograde endocannabinoid signaling at inhibitory synapses in vivo" (Dudok et al, Science, 2024)

Vote for us!
We are a finalist for a prestigious Signal Award for Best Science Podcast of 2024! Share your love for the show by voting for us in the Listener's Choice category by October 17. Thanks in advance!

Get in touch:
We're doing some listener research and we want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu if you'd be willing to help out, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today we are re-releasing an episode we did last year with Stanford neurobiologist Lisa Giocomo exploring the intersection of memory, navigation and the boundaries we create between ourselves and the world around us.

This episode was inspired by the idea of memory palaces. The idea is simple: Take a place you're very familiar with, say the house you grew up in, and place information you want to remember in different locations within that space. When it's time to remember those things, you can mentally walk through that space and retrieve those items.

This ancient technique reveals something very fundamental about how our brains work. It turns out that the same parts of the brain are responsible both for memory and for navigating through the world.

Scientists are learning more and more about these systems and the connections between them, and it's revealing surprising insights about how we build the narrative of our lives, how we turn our environments into an internal model of who we are, and where we fit into the world.

Join us to learn more about the neuroscience of space and memory.

Before we get into this week’s episode, we have a favor to ask. We're working to make this show even better, and we want to hear from you. We're in the process of gathering listener input and feedback. If you'd be willing to help out, send us a short note and we'll be in touch. As always, we are at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more:

• About Lisa Giocomo’s research
• About the story of Henry Molaison (patient H. M.), who lost the ability to form new memories after epilepsy treatment removed his hippocampus.
• About the 2014 Nobel Prize in medicine, awarded to John O’Keefe and to May-Britt and Edvard Moser (Giocomo’s mentors) for their discovery of the GPS system of the brain.
• About Memory Palaces, a technique used since ancient times to enhance memory using mental maps.

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker. Our logo is by Aimee Garza. The show is hosted by Nicholas Weiler at Stanford's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. 

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

In the past few years, Big Pharma has released not one, but three new treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.

Aducanemab (2021), Lecanemab (2023), and Donanemab (2024), are the first treatments to effectively clear the brain of amyloid plaques — the sticky protein clumps whose build-up in the brain has defined the disease for decades. The problem? They may not help patients at all.

Today’s guest, Stanford neurologist Mike Greicius, considers the new amyloid-clearing drugs a major disappointment — and worse, says they likely do more harm than good for patients.

Despite this critique, Greicius, thinks that the next few years will be an exciting time for novel Alzheimer’s therapies, as growing biological understanding of Alzheimer’s risk and resilience bear fruit with promising new approaches to treatment.

Learn More:

Greicius is the Iqbal Farrukh and Asad Jamal Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford Medicine, and a member of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience and Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Stanford University.

Amyloid Drug Skepticism:

• Substantial Doubt Remains about the Efficacy of Anti-Amyloid Antibodies
  (Commentary, Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, 2024)
• New Drug Approved for Early Alzheimer’s (New York Times, 2024)
• Alzheimer's drug adoption in US slowed by doctors' skepticism (Reuters, 2024)
• One step back: Why the new Alzheimer’s plaque-attack drugs don’t work (Stanford Medicine Scope Blog, 2024)

Alzheimer's Genetics Research:

• Knight-funded research uncovers gene mutations that may prevent Alzheimer’s Disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
• Why is a common gene variant bad for your brain? (Stanford Medicine Magazine, 2024)
• Scientists find genetic Alzheimer’s risk factor tied to African ancestry (Stanford Medicine, 2023)

Episode Credits

This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Getting help for depression can be like purgatory. Setting aside for a moment the stigma and other barriers to seeking treatment in the first place, finding the right combination of medication and/or therapy can be a months- or years-long process of trial and error. And for about one third of people, nothing seems to work.

Today we're talking with Dr. Leanne Williams, the founding director of the Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness and Vincent V.C. Woo Professor in the Stanford Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Williams and her team have recently used brain imaging and machine learning techniques to identify six distinct "biotypes" of depression — each of which may require a different approach to treatment. Beyond setting the stage for more targeted therapies, better understanding the biology behind the disease could finally cut through the stigma of one of the world's most common brain disorders.

Learn more

• Williams' Personalized and Translational Neuroscience Lab (PANlab)
• The Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health and Wellness
• NEW: Cognitive behavioral therapy enhances brain circuits to relieve depression (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• Six distinct types of depression identified in Stanford Medicine-led study
  (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
  • Personalized brain circuit scores identify clinically distinct biotypes in depression and anxiety (Nature Medicine, 2024)
• Brain scans could help personalize treatment for people who are depressed or suicidal (Science, 2022)
• Williams' scientific publications
  
  

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today, we're talking with Stanford neuro-oncologist, Michelle Monje. This is actually the third time we've had Michelle on the show, in part because she's been a pioneer of three exciting frontiers in neuroscience — so far! 

This week, we're going to talk about cancer neuroscience. Michelle founded this new field with her discovery that deadly brain tumors not only link up physically with the healthy brain tissue surrounding them, but the cancers actually need the brain's electrical activity to grow and spread.

It turns out that many cancers — not only in the brain — depend on nervous system innervation for their survival. Understanding this dependent relationship better may present an exciting new line of attack for oncology. 

Join us to learn more!

News coverage

• Brain tumors caused by normal neuron activity in mice predisposed to such tumors
• Brain tumors form synapses with healthy neurons, Stanford-led study finds
• Deadly brain cancers act like 'vampires' by hijacking normal cells to grow
• Engineered immune cells target broad range of pediatric solid tumors in mice

Relevant Publications

• Glioma synapses recruit mechanisms of adaptive plasticity
• Glioblastoma remodelling of human neural circuits decreases survival
• Electrical and synaptic integration of glioma into neural circuits
• Targeting neuronal activity-regulated neuroligin-3 dependency in high-grade glioma
• Neuronal Activity Promotes Glioma Growth through Neuroligin-3 Secretion

Review Articles

• The neuroscience of cancer
• Cancer hallmarks intersect with neuroscience in the tumor microenvironment
• Roadmap for the Emerging Field of Cancer Neuroscience

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This week on From Our Neurons to Yours, we're talking about using new techniques for growing human brain tissue in the lab to solve a rare neurological disorder.

Host Nicholas Weiler sits down with Sergiu Pasca an innovative Stanford scientist who has developed groundbreaking technologies to grow human brain tissue in the lab, creating "organoids" and "assembloids" that model brain disorders like autism and schizophrenia. 

Pasca describes the process of turning patient skin cells into embryo-like stem cells and then into functional brain cells that can live and develop for over two years, and even be transplanted into rat brains to study their growth and development.

It may sound like science fiction, but these techniques represent a major step toward understanding and treating complex neurological conditions such as Timothy syndrome, a rare genetic disorder whose biology Pasca has spent the past 15 years unraveling. 

Join us for fascinating glimpse into the future of developmental neuroscience and  potential for new therapies for our remarkable self-assembling brains.

Learn more

• Brain organoids and assembloids are new models for elucidating, treating neurodevelopmental disorders | News Center | Stanford Medicine
• Impact of genes linked to neurodevelopmental diseases found | News Center | Stanford Medicine
• Scientists discover how dozens of genes may contribute to autism - The Washington Post
• Study suggests approach for treating rare disorder | National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• How lab-grown brain cells can now help us understand brain disorders

Episode Credits
This episode was produced by Michael Osborne, with production assistance by Morgan Honaker, and hosted by Nicholas Weiler. Art by Aimee Garza.

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.