CogNation

Why do we dream, and what is the meaning of our dreams? Rolf and Joe talk about several ideas about dreaming, including a new theory by David Eagleman called the "defensive activation theory", which proposes that dreams are like a screen saver to keep the visual parts of the brain from being overtaken by other senses.Eagleman, D. M., & Vaughn, D. A. (2020). The Defensive Activation theory: dreaming as a mechanism to prevent takeover of the visual cortex. bioRxiv, 2020-07.

Daniel Dennett, who passed away on April 19th at the age of 82, was one of the great philosophers of our time. Rolf and Joe discuss his ideas and his influence on the field of philosophy, including (especially) bringing consciousness back as a topic of serious study with his book "Consciousness Explained", as well as his work on free will, evolution, religion, and constructing a convincing argument.

What can neuroscience teach us about AI, and vice versa, what can AI teach us about our own intelligence?Joe and Rolf talk to returning guest Daniel Sternberg about advances in AI over the past year. Topics include using the methods of cognitive psychology to understand AI; representation in artificial intelligence; what current large language models (LLMs) are good at and not good at; sentience in AI; the future of humanity; and other important stuff.Natural and Artificial Intelligence: A brief introduction to the interplay between AI and neuroscience research (Macpherson, et al., 2021)Can AI language models replace human participants? (Dillion, et al., 2023)Language models show human-like content effects on reasoning (Dasgupta et al., 2022)

This episode is dedicated to the memory of colleague and friend Grace Baron.Joe and Rolf talk to Dr. Matthew Goodwin, a professor at Northeastern University whose research focus is on autism. His most recent paper used biosensing (heart rate, skin conductance, etc.) to predict aggressive behavior in profound autistic individuals up to three minutes before the event.