Neuroscientist Rishi talks about his research: the tradeoffs that our brain has to make in its functioning, and how its different parts may work at different time-scales. We discuss distributed computing in the brain: how do millions of neurons collaborate without an organizing center?Rishi explains his work of using math and computer science to understand how our brains efficiently pack and correctly recover our memories, and of finding patterns in the neural firing of awake and asleep mice.