human brain
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Search complete. 89 mentions across 14 episodes found for "human brain".
Sep 7, 2026
Peter ScottHOST
Last week, I started talking with Josche Bach, renowned cognitive scientist who uses the lens of artificial intelligence to understand the human mind.
Peter ScottHOST
He's taught and researched at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute for Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, MIT's Media Lab, and the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.
Peter ScottHOST
He's the creator of the MicroSci Cognitive Architecture, the author of Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, and the executive director of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness.
Peter ScottHOST
Last week, we talked about the Institute's mission, the machine consciousness hypothesis, why we actually are in a particular kind of simulation, dreaming, the role of perceptions and predictions, and a fascinating take on Searle's Chinese room.
speaker_2NARRATOR
but it is happening nonetheless, and it is one of the reasons why the transition can be disrupted by unfamiliar environments, unexpected sounds, or the presence of perceived threats.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The brain is running a checklist during the transition, and if any item on that checklist fails, the transition may be slowed, interrupted, or reversed.
speaker_2NARRATOR
During this fade, many things change throughout the body, Brain waves begin to slow, the fast, high-frequency oscillations of waking alertness giving way to slower, more rhythmic patterns.
speaker_2NARRATOR
The fast, alert waves of waking calm, the beta waves that characterize focused, engaged thinking, giving way to the gentler alpha waves of relaxed wakefulness, and then to the still slower theta waves that mark the edge of unconsciousness.
speaker_2NARRATOR
Slower, gentler waves take over, sweeping through the cortex in long, lazy rhythms that are as different from waking brain activity as a calm sea is from a choppy one so the brain shifts its rhythm moving from the fast irregular patterns of alertness to the slow regular patterns of drowsiness it moves from alert to drowsy in a measurable observable way A shift that can be seen on an electroencephalogram, as clearly as a change in the weather, can be seen on a satellite image.
speaker_3HOST
Break that down for us.
speaker_4HOST
So the human brain is a massive energy hog.
speaker_4HOST
It accounts for about 2% of our body weight, but it consumes nearly 20% of our resting metabolic energy.
speaker_4HOST
20%.
speaker_1HOST
Yeah.
speaker_0HOST
And she's written other intense Oxford University Press books, right? Like Cruelty, Human Evil and the Human Brain and the Fragile Brain.
speaker_1HOST
Exactly.
speaker_1HOST
So she is perfectly positioned to unpack the absolute extremes of human cognition.
Ray CochranHOST
I thought this one was a fun one from Smithsonian Magazine.
Ray CochranHOST
And the headline is that meat wasn't the only thing that grew the human brain.
Ray CochranHOST
Sugar may have helped too.
Ray CochranHOST
The standard story has been that early humans got big brains because they started eating meat and later because they learned to cook.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
At a certain point, I started seeing neurotech broadly construed.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
When I think about neurotech, I think both about direct real-world applications, and I also think about the science applications and sort of applications in the structure of knowledge once we can crack neurotech, that it really should be considered to be extremely root level or central in the tech tree beyond this kind of applied domain of stuff we can do with the human brain, with devices or something like that.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
So I think of it in ex- maybe my view of neurotech is kind of maximally broad and includes really, like, the tech for science, which is a lot of also why we've been doing the focus research organizations and all that.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
But at a, at a really high level, I think you can bucket...
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
One bucket is sort of understanding the brain in both health and disease.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
Sounds like an interesting thing to do, but I mean, if you really think about that, I mean, I think that is a kind of a AGI complete problem, right? That's not necessarily how we're mostly making progress on AI today, but understanding the actual algorithms of the human brain is a lot of how people thought we would get to AGI and is sort of clearly an AGI complete problem.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
I think it's also clearly somehow necessary on the path to understanding what consciousness is and more deeply understanding the features of human consciousness and what other types of consciousness is possible, and I think we are still far from that, but clearly that's needed.
Adam MarblestoneGUEST
Then there's the sort of in disease part of that sentence where most brain diseases, we just don't really know still what causes it.
Jason SchroederHOST
So I'm never looking at somebody and being like, "Wow, you as a human soul, as a consciousness, as an entity, as a light, as a whatever may or may not continue to exist, is bad." I'm gonna assume that you're good.
Jason SchroederHOST
But your brain, and if you actually start to look at it this way, you're gonna, you're gonna start to think it's funny how not helpful, um, the, uh, the human body and the human brain is.
Jason SchroederHOST
Now, this is, this is where I gotta be careful, because in the framework of God created as perfect and there's fallen man, um, and woman, like, I'm wrong about this.
Jason SchroederHOST
But like I, I u- I remember back in the day hearing at church people bragging about the human body and being like, "Only, only God could have created this magnificent body, the eyeball and the, and your liver and the blah, blah, blah.
5 MINS LATER
Jason SchroederHOST
I'm like, no matter how many times I signpost to them, we need to have one conversation.
Jason SchroederHOST
It's fine for me to say, "Have one conversation," but their brain took them off of focusing on me and told them to start talking to somebody else.
Jason SchroederHOST
So my point in this whole pod-- or podca- yeah, podcast is that you cannot leave human brains unprompted.
Jason SchroederHOST
For the ADHD brain, you're gonna have to make it interesting.
ParzivalHOST
One last question, and it is the one that decides whether biology stays in the race at all.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
How long until AI is more efficient per watt than the human brain? I think we're probably already there.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
So that's a hot take on this one.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
People have this maybe like fetishization of the Landauer limit, thinking, oh, well, we must really be far away in efficiency per watt from what biology is able to accomplish.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
The our whole organism and mammals in general were never optimized for compute.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
Whereas silicon and CMOS and whatever comes after CMOS, maybe it'll be photonics, which I know Dave is of interest, it was optimized from scratch, was designed for compute.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
I don't think the human brain is as efficient as many think.
Alex Wissner-GrossGUEST
And the argument can be made that actually, if you look at watts per task or watt hours per task basis, the leading edge GPUs may actually be already more efficient than human brains.
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