From Our Neurons to Yours

Today on the show, why do some of us age faster than others? Why do some of us grow old and die before our time while others seem to simply endure? And most of us have probably wondered at one point or another, which track am I on? 
Turns out it might be possible to predict the whole trajectory of an animal's life at a surprisingly young age, just by looking closely at subtle patterns of behavior. That's the conclusion of a new study from researchers at the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience here at Wu Tsai Neuro, out March 12, 2026 in the journal Science. 
The study focused on the African turquoise killifish, a little fish that lives fast and dies young. This species has one of the shortest lifespans of any vertebrate, which makes it ideal for studying the entire arc of a life in the laboratory setting.

The important point here is that even short-lived killifish are dealt different lots by the fates. Even when you control for genetics and the environment, some killifish only live a month or two, while others can live as long as a year. So the big question is, what drives this difference in longevity? 
To learn more, we're joined today by the study's two lead researchers, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Postdoctoral Scholars, Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath, who performed the research in the labs of Anne Brunet and Karl Deisseroth here at Stanford.
Learn More
To study aging, researchers give killifish the CRISPR treatment (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
Study pinpoints key mechanism of brain aging (Stanford Report, 2025)
Killifish project explores the genetic foundation of longevity (Stanford Medicine 2015)
Multi-tissue transcriptomic aging
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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.

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
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.

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.