From Our Neurons to Yours

We know shockingly little about what goes on in a mother’s brain during pregnancy.
For example, we know only a handful of the hormones involved—out of hundreds scientists think may exist—and very little about how they might impact the brain. This gap in our understanding is one of the reasons we don’t have great treatments for pregnancy-related maladies, whether it’s extreme nausea, or anxiety and depression.
Closing this gap is the mission of the new Stanford Neuro-Pregnancy Initiative, part of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute's Big Ideas in Neuroscience Program. 
Today on the show, we speak with initiative leaders Nirao Shah, a neuroscientist who studies sex differences in animal behavior, and Katrin Svensson is an expert in how our tissues use hormones to communicate in health and disease. Together with Longzhi Tan, an expert in gene regulation and 3d genome structure, the team aims to chart the cellular and molecular transformation that occurs in a mother's brain during pregnancy, in hopes of better understanding this fundamental event in a person's life and improving health outcomes for both mothers and infants. 
Learn more:
Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
Nirao Shah lab
Katrin Svensson lab
Longzhi Tan lab
References:
Hoekzema, E., et al. (2017) Pregnancy leads to long-lasting changes in human brain structure. Nat Neurosci 20, 287–296. This is the landmark neuroimaging study discussed in the episode that provided evidence of long-lasting, pregnancy-induced changes in the structure of the human brain. 
Fejzo, M., et al. (2024) GDF15 linked to maternal risk of nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. Nature 625, 760–767. This recent paper provides strong evidence that the hormone GDF15 acts on the brainstem to cause nausea and vomiting in pregnancy.
Knoedler J, et al. A functional cellular framework for sex and estrous cycle-dependent gene expression and behavior. Cell. 185, e1–e18 (2022). This is the work from Dr. Shah’s lab mentioned in the episode, identifying a specific circuit in the hypothalamus that changes its connectivity across
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Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Here’s a question for you that may at first seem trivial, but is actually profound: Why do our minds drift? 
If you have ever dabbled in mindfulness or meditation, you know this mind wandering has an almost gravitational pull. In fact, researchers now think we spend as much as 50 percent of our waking time in this state, which cognitive scientists have dubbed the brain’s “default mode.”
Today’s guest is Vinod Menon. He’s a giant in the field of cognitive science who played a central role in defining the brain “default mode network” back in 2003. 
In our conversation, he argues our tendency to daydream may be at the core of our self-identities, our creativity – and also many of our most troubling psychiatric disorders, from Alzheimer’s to ADHD.
Vinod Menon is Rachel L. and Walter F. Nichols, MD., Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at Stanford Medicine, and an affiliate of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.
Learn More
Menon's "Stanford Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience Laboratory"
Stanford Medicine study identifies distinct brain organization patterns in women and men (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
Children with autism have broad memory difficulties, Stanford Medicine-led study finds (Stanford Medicine, 2023)
Interactions between attention-grabbing brain networks weak in ADHD (Stanford Medicine, 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 [email protected]
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

For decades, Alzheimer's research has focused on clearing amyloid plaques from the brain. But new drugs that successfully remove plaques have proven clinically "underwhelming", leaving the field searching for alternative approaches.
Stanford neurologist Katrin Andreasson has spent twenty years pursuing a different path—investigating how aging triggers an energy crisis in the brain's immune and support cells. Her work reveals that inflammation and metabolic dysfunction in microglia and astrocytes may be the real drivers of Alzheimer's pathology. 
Most remarkably, her recent research—supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience here at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute—shows that targeting inflammation in the peripheral immune system—outside the brain entirely—can restore memory in mouse models of the disease. 
While human trials are still needed, Andreasson's findings offer fresh hope and demonstrate the critical importance of supporting curiosity-driven science, even when it challenges prevailing dogma.
Learn More:
Alzheimer's Association honors Katrin Andreasson
Research links age-related inflammation, microglia and Alzheimer’s Disease
Q&A: How the aging immune system impacts brain health
Rethinking Alzheimer's: Could it begin outside the brain?
Why new Alzheimer's drugs may not work for patients
Parkinson’s comes in many forms. New biomarkers may explain why.
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 [email protected]
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

The AI revolution of the past few years is built on brain-inspired neural network models originally developed to study our own minds. The question is, what should we make of the fact that our own rich mental lives are built on the same foundations as the seemingly soulless chat-bots we now interact with on a daily basis?
Our guest this week is Stanford cognitive scientist Jay McClelland, who has been a leading figure in this field since the 1980s, when he developed some of the first of these artificial neural network models. Now McClelland has a new book, co-authored with SF State University computational neuroscientist Gaurav Suri, called "The Emergent Mind: How Intelligence Arises in People and Machines." 
We spoke with McClelland about the entangled history of neuroscience and AI, and whether the theory of the emergent mind described in the book can help us better understand ourselves and our relationship with the technology we've created.
Learn More 
New book sheds light on human and machine intelligence | Stanford Report
How Intelligence – Both Human and Artificial – Happens | KQED Forum 
From Brain to Machine: The Unexpected Journey of Neural Networks | Stanford HAI
Wu Tsai Neuro's Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology
McClelland, J. L. & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375-407. [PDF]
Rumelhart, D. E., McClelland, J. L., & the PDP research group. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volumes I & II. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McClelland, J. L. & Rogers, T. T. (2003). The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 310-322. [PDF]
McClelland, J. L., Hill, F., Rudolph, M., Baldridge, J., & Schuetze, H. (2020). Placing language in and integrated understanding system: Next steps toward human-level performance in neural language models. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(42), 25966-25974. [
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 [email protected]
Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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