Brain Inspired

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The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

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Michael Cole is a professor at the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University. After 10 years running The Cole Neurocognition Lab, and reflecting on the work they've done and the field more broadly, he decided to write a book: Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind. In the book, Michael argues that brain flows are the fundamental units of brain function and therefore cognition. We discuss what a brain flow is and is not, and how viewing cognition through the brain flow lens differs from other approaches, like viewing populations of neuron activity as fundamental units of cognition. In fact, Michael has found that most of the signal processing going on is between areas of networks, not within the areas of the networks. The first part of the discussion covers those kinds of basics, then we move on to discuss how different organizational features of brain flows, like compositional hierarchies, might explain "higher" cognitive functions like value-based goals, emotion, creativity, consciousness, intelligence, and mental disorders.

The Cole Neurocognition Lab

Twitter: @mwcole.bsky.social; @TheColeLab

Book:

Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind

0:00 - Intro
4:43 - Brain Flows
15:09 - Flow as a fundamental unit
16:45 - Functional connectivity
20:24 - Backstory
24:31 - Activity flow modeling
37:30 - Generative understanding
44:12 - Hierarchical compositionality
48:09 - Novelty
50:50 - Cognitive control
56:38 - Creativity
1:14:06 - Mental health and flows
1:21:51 - Consciousness and flow fields
1:31:12 - AI and brain flows

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The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Andrea Hiott is a philosopher at Universität Heidelberg, but she has various degrees across philosophy and neuroscience. You may know her from her podcast Love and Philosophy, or her Way-making substack, or her writings elsewhere. Through all her work runs a central theme, that we need to go beyond dichotomous thinking and learn to hold paradoxes as they are. Holding Paradox is the title of her new book. The full title is Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind, and that subtitle, the navigational approach, is the term Andrea uses for her version of what should replace the current computational metaphor of the mind. In the book, Andrea uses the rich history of research in a particular brain area, the hippocampus, to illustrate what holding paradox is and what the navigational approach is. The hippocampus is a good example to use, because it has two parallel histories- one as the seat of our memory, and another as a cognitive map, how we move through the world and how we move through our thoughts.

Andrea's website.

Book:

Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind

Podcast:

Love and Philosophy

Substack:

Way-making

Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating.

0:00 - Intro
3:01 - Creating vs criticizing
5:25 - Holding paradox
9:04 - Neuroscience and philosophy
11:42 - Hippocampus and movement
18:05 - Computational metaphor
30:52 - Ways of doing science
43:25 - Why is now the time?
51:34 - Navigational mind and AI
1:09:27 - Perspectivalism vs holding paradox
1:21:31 - Consciousness
1:25:38 - How to be alive
1:29:26 - Holding paradox community?

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The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Maxim Raginsky is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max describes himself as interested in probability and stochastic processes, deterministic and stochastic control, machine learning, optimization, and information theory. Today we mostly lean on his control theory expertise, although you'll here his knowledge is vast in many other domains, even some neuroscience. I wanted his control theory perspective on neuroscience, AI, and biological autonomy, so we dance around a lot of topics related to those. Max also writes a substack called The Art of the Realizable, from which I drew during parts of our conversation.

Maxim Raginsky

Substack: The Art of the Realizable.

Related papers

Biological Autonomy

Control-related episodes

BI 143 Rodolphe Sepulchre: Mixed Feedback Control

BI 205 Dmitri Chklovskii: Neurons Are Smarter Than You Think

Read the transcript.

0:00 - Intro
3:07 - Low energy lifestyle
4:27 - Engineering and philosophy?
13:52 - Brains vs AI
19:45 - Inferring the inside from behavior
30:57 - Analog vs digital
41:32 - Is the brain a control system?
46:50 - Willems control
1:02:12 - Control vs cybernetics
1:13:26 - A control perspective on AI vs brains
1:17:46 - AGI
1:21:48 - Turing 1950
1:29:07 - Perceptual control theory and active inference
1:40:09 - Passive control in the brain?
1:41:48 - Computation
1:43:36 - Counting spikes

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Andrea Gambarotto is a postdoctoral philosopher and researcher at the University of Luxembourg. He is an expert in the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, most commonly known as Hegel. More recently he has been studying the relation between some of Hegel's ideas and those of modern theoretical biology regarding questions of autonomy and agency. Andrea argues that, where Immanuel Kant believed we should explain biological stuff and inanimate stuff the same way- via mechanistic explanations, Hegel believed to explain the biological stuff, we should leverage the fact the biological organisms have intrinsic purpose… agency. And, Hegel's approach is in line with what's called the enactive approach in cognitive science, which has a long history and continues to thrive. Andrea explains all of that during our discussion. One reason I invited Andrea on is because these issues get the heart of what some of us care about, which is, what are the differences and similarities between our natural intelligence and engineered artificial intelligence? Why should we care about those differences? A large language model isn't alive, but does it have a mind? Should we call what it does cognition? What are the relations between life, mind, cognition, intelligence, consciousness? Those kinds of questions. We even discuss why the famed octopus might be really intelligent but not conscious.

Andrea Gambarotto

Gambarotto papers

Enactivism and the Hegelian stance on intrinsic purposiveness

Body plan organization and the evolution of conscious agency

Blog: Dialectical Systems

Papers also mentioned

Weber & Varela 2002: Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality.

Mossio & Bich 2014: What makes biological organisation teleological?

Bechtel & Bich & 2021: Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology.

Pessoa 2026: Beyond networks: Toward adaptive models of biological complexity.

Levins 1998: Dialectics and Systems Theory.

Barandiaran & Moreno 2006: On What Makes Certain Dynamical Systems Cognitive: A Minimally Cognitive Organization Program.

Books mentioned

Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science

An Evolutionary Story of Agency

0:00 - Intro
7:51 - Intrinsic and extrinsic purposiveness
14:39 - Hegel, Kant, and autonomy
28:07 - Constraint closure and enactivism
35:13 - How Hegel and Enactivitsm agree
43:58 - Dialectics
57:44 - Brain activity and enactivism
1:20:02 - Heidegger and cognitive science
1:26:59 - Artificial intelligence and Hegel
1:29:15 - Mind agency decoupling
1:43:38 - Evolution of conscious agency
1:52:42 - Heterarchy via McCulloch

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for Brain Inspired email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Daniel Levenstein started his NeuroAI and Dynamics Lab at Yale University about a year ago. We briefly discuss what it's like to transition from a postdoc to a principle investigator, i.e. head of the lab. But most mostly we discuss his work and ideas. Dan studies spontaneous neural activity during sleep, specially in brain areas like hippocampus and cortex, and how this internally generated spontaneous activity is related to learning and memory and navigation. Really, he used to study those processes directly through experimental brain recording datasets. These days he builds and studies models of those processes, using AI models and seeing how their dynamics and functions match what we see in brains.

Levenstein Lab

Social: @dlevenstein.bsky.social

Related papers

On the Role of Theory and Modeling in Neuroscience

The problem-ladenness of theory

Sequential predictive learning is a unifying theory for hippocampal representation and replay

0:00 - Intro
9:12 - Neuro-AI
18:23 - Experiment vs theory
20:36 - Ground vs active state neuron activity
25:38 - Beginning a lab
31:34 - Sleep and Internally generated activity
40:02 - Spiking neural networks
52:13 - Naturalistic neuro-AI
59:52 - Cognitive maps, world models
1:04:16 - Weasel words and motifs
1:08:17 - Transformers and brains
1:18:53 - AI vs biology
1:24:32 - Neuroscience theory