From Our Neurons to Yours – Details, episodes & analysis

Imagine what it’s like to lose your ability to speak. You know what you want to say, but the connection between your brain and the muscles that form words is no longer functioning. For people with conditions like ALS, or who experience a severe stroke, this is a devastating reality. 

Today's guest is Erin Kunz, a postdoctoral researcher in the Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory at Stanford, who is part of a global community of scientists working towards the vision of a brain–computer interface — or BCI — to bypass those broken circuits and restore the ability to speak to people with paralysis.

We discuss how these BCIs work and the inspiring progress the tech has made in recent years, as well as the troubling question of whether a technology designed to decode what people intend to say from their brain activity could one day read out thoughts they never intended to communicate?

Learn More

• Study of promising speech-enabling interface offers hope for restoring communication (Stanford Medicine, 2025)
• For Some Patients, the ‘Inner Voice’ May Soon Be Audible (The New York Times, 2025)
• These brain implants speak your mind — even when you don't want to (NPR, 2025)
• A mind-reading brain implant that comes with password protection(Nature, 2025)
• How neural prosthetics could free minds trapped by brain injury(From Our Neurons to Yours, 2024)
• Brain implants, software guide speech-disabled person’s intended words to computer screen (Stanford Medicine, 2023)
• Software turns ‘mental handwriting’ into on-screen words, sentences (Stanford Medicine, 2021)

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.

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

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

Neuroscientists have spent the past few decades tracing the network of brain systems—some deep and emotional, and others more analytical and deliberate— that work together as we make tough choices like where to invest our money as well as more everyday decisions like which videos to watch online—or, for that matter, which podcast to listen to.

You can imagine that the ability to listen in on the brain systems that guide our choices might start to let scientists predict our decisions. But today's guest has taken this a step further, showing that measuring brain activity in just a few individuals can actually forecast widespread social behaviors, like which stock prices are likely to go up or down on the market, or which videos are likely to go viral. 

Join us as we talk with Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, about the frontiers of neuroeconomics, bridging psychology, economics, and neuroscience. 

Learn More

• SPANlab (Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience)
• NeuroChoice: Eight years of forging connections to illuminate and empower choice (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
• Brain imaging links stimulant-use relapse to distinct nerve pathway (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2022)
• Brain activity data may improve stock market forecasts, study shows (The Guardian, 2021)
• Your brain knows whether a video will go viral online (Stanford Report, 2020)
• Odds are good that risky gambling choices are influenced by a single brain connection, Stanford research shows (Stanford Report, 2016)
• Smile boosts chances of getting a microloan, say Stanford psychologists (Stanford Report, 2015)
• Stanford scientists see how the brain makes environmental decisions (Stanford Report, 2015)

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 research, and we'll be in touch with some follow-up questions.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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