From Our Neurons to Yours

On today’s show, something special: a conversation we recorded live at our 13th Annual Symposium on “Building the Brain”. 

The event featured experts at the frontiers of brain development research asking questions like how much of our brain wiring is driven by genetics versus experience and whether we could use AI to understand the way infants naturally learn about the world around them. You can see some of these talks on our YouTube channel.

Each year at the Symposium we also host a fireside chat where leading Stanford researchers help us take a step back and look at the state of the field as a whole. 

This year, we collaborated with The Future of Everything podcast and its host, bioengineer Russ Altman, to bring that conversation to you. 

Russ spoke onstage with Karen Parker, who studies how our brains – and those of other primates – develop socially. She’s been studying how hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin are linked to differences in social cognition and the implications for children with autism, and she’s been working to translate these basic science findings to clinical trials.

Also on stage was Jason Yeatman, who studies how children learn to read and the challenges faced by kids with dyslexia. He’s developed online reading assessment tools and brought them to 1.2 million students at nearly 3,000 schools. 

While their individual work is different in approach, the conversation sheds light on the opportunities and obstacles researchers face in turning scientific discovery into real-world impact, whether in the clinic or the classroom.

Learn more:

• 2026 Wu Tsai Neuro Symposium: Building the Brain
• Parker Lab Social Neurosciences Research Program
• Yeatman’s Brain Development and Education Lab
• Rapid Online Assessment of Reading
• The Future of Everything
• Russ Altman
• ‘Our goal is to build bridges between the lab and the classroom’ | Stanford Report
• Reading-specific region differs in the dyslexic brain (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Potential autism biomarker found in babies (Stanford Medicine, 2020)
• Autism May Have ‘Unnoticed’ Driver, Say Stanford Neuroscientists (Newsweek, 2024)

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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. 

This week, Wu Tsai Neuro launched the Stanford Digital Brain Project, an ambitious effort to build predictive models of the human brain.

So today on the show, we’re bringing you two conversations to get you up to speed on what this new initiative is and why it matters.

First we’re going to revisit a conversation from last year with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Dan Yamins about the vision for building digital models of the brain. We talked about how such models would let neuroscientists test hypotheses about brain function or develop personalized interventions for brain diseases in a virtual environment far faster than can be done in the lab.

Then, in the second half of the episode, we'll bring you a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Russ Poldrack, one of the leaders of the new initiative, about what it's actually going to take to build this thing. We talk about the experiments now getting underway to capture the brain data that'll be needed to train these models, and why collecting this kind of data is already a remarkable scientific undertaking on its own, well before anyone actually builds a model out of it.

Learn more

• Stanford Digital Brain Project to build predictive models of the human brain (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
• Building predictive models of the brain (Stanford YouTube)
• Building AI simulations of the human brain (From Our Neurons To Yours, 2025)
• Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
• AI models of the brain could serve as digital twins in research (Stanford Medicine, 2025) 
• The Yamins NeuroAI Lab
• The Poldrack Lab
• Dan Yamins on Substack
• Russ Poldrack on Substack

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. 

Today we’re going to be talking about a recent study that is rewriting neuroscience textbooks, potentially changing our understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, our brain’s immune system, and the potential for immunotherapy for the brain.

Today’s guest is Julia Belk, lead author of a new study that discovered that as we age, immune cells from the blood somehow cross the supposedly impenetrable blood–brain barrier, and replace the brain’s native immune cells, the microglia. The findings help us understand growing links between the aging immune system and Alzheimer’s disease and why certain blood mutations – ones traditionally linked to cancer – might actually protect against neurodegeneration.

Julia is an HHMI Hannah Gray postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Sidd Jaiswal at Stanford Medicine. Their research was supported by the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro.

Learn More

• Jaiswal Lab at Stanford Medicine
• Mutant microglia and resilience to Alzheimer’s disease
• Blood Cells Replenish Microglia in the Brain as People Age (The Scientist, 2026)
• Peripheral Blood Cells Replenish Aging Human Microglia (Neuroscience News, 2026)
• Aging brains welcome reinforcements from outside immune cells (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
• Blood Cells Mutated in Old Age Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2023)
• Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50 (Ground Truths, a Substack from Eric Topol, 2026
• Somatic mutations reveal the ontogeny of microglia in human ageing (Nature, 2026)
• Clonal hematopoiesis is associated with protection from Alzheimer’s disease (Nature Medicine, 2023) 

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. 

Today on the show we're doing something a little different.

Quite different, actually. Nine seasons in, listeners might wonder: Why do we make this show? How do we prepare for it? What do we hope you get out of it? What even is the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute? 

The idea has been brewing for a while, and this time we're doing it: From Our Neurons To Yours is taking you behind the scenes of From Our Neurons To Yours. Producer Michael Osborne joins host Nicholas Weiler to talk about where the show came from, how we get ready to bring you to the frontiers of neuroscience, and yes, what Wu Tsai Neuro is all about.

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. 

Today on the show, we explore the complex biology underlying a seemingly straightforward question: How do our brains stay healthy – or not – as we age?

There seems to be a constant flow of new secrets to healthy brain aging – inflammation, estrogen levels, how the brain clears out its waste. We've talked about many of these explanations on the show, and it can be easy to think that whatever the latest one is, that's the one. At least until the next one comes along.

In reality, each of those things is probably part of a larger complex system that guides brain aging. But if that's the case, how do the parts fit together, and how do scientists figure out interventions that could slow or prevent neurodegeneration?  

That's a tricky challenge to be sure, but it's that challenge we're going to dive into with today's guest, neurobiologist Tom Clandinin. 

Learn more

• Clandinin Lab
• Qiu Lab
• Allen Lab
• Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
• Convergence of biological and artificial networks (Current Biology, 2021)
• Coupling of activity, metabolism and behaviour across the Drosophila brain (Nature, 2021)
• Drosophila Connectomics: Mapping the Larval Eye’s Mind (Current Biology, 2017)
• Flies and humans share a motion estimation strategy that exploits natural scene statistics (Nature Neuroscience, 2014)

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. 

Today on the show, we bring you a conversation with Carolyn Bertozzi, the Baker Family Director of Sarafan ChEM-H and the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences. 

Bertozzi is a Nobel Laureate, a MacArthur Fellow, and an all around cool person – although it didn't come up in the conversation, she used to play in a band with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello.

Although Bertozzi wouldn’t call herself a neuroscientist — she’s a chemist at heart – her work is having a big impact on neuroscience. Today, she focuses on the sugar molecules that stud the outer surfaces of our cells. It turns out that these molecules are incredibly important for how cells communicate with each other. But understanding these molecules is so complex and challenging that Bertozzi had to invent a new branch of chemistry in order to study them. In this episode, we'll hear how this research is opening doors not only within neuroscience but across biology and drug development as well.

Learn more

• The Bertozzi Lab
• ‘To advance science, I think it’s important to blur the boundaries between the disciplines’ (Stanford Report, 2026)
• Changes in brain’s ‘sugar shield’ could be key to understanding effects of aging (Stanford Report, 2025)
• Life is sweet (Stanford Magazine, 2022)
• Stanford’s Carolyn Bertozzi wins Nobel in chemistry (Stanford Report, 2022)
• Interview with Carolyn Bertozzi (Nobelprize.org, 2022)
• Aging brains pile up damaged proteins (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2025)
• Nobel Prize: How click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry are transforming the pharmaceutical and material industries (The Conversation, 2022)
• Glycocalyx dysregulation impairs blood-brain barrier in ageing and disease (Nature, 2025)

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. 

Health influencers and scientists have both gone crazy for peptides.

The peptide health craze stems from a lot of online hype — centered on gray-market compounds that haven't been rigorously tested in humans and aren't regulated for safety or purity. But among scientists, there is a genuine "revolution" underway — spurred by technological developments revealing an order of magnitude more peptides in our bodies than we ever realized, and by the unexpected and unparalleled success of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.

To learn more about what’s driving this excitement – and how much of the peptide hype is really worth your attention – we spoke with Stanford biochemist Jonathan Long, an associate professor of pathology at Stanford Medicine, an affiliate of the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and an Institute Scholar of Stanford Sarafan ChEM-H.

Editor's Note: After we went to press, Colorado biotech Enveda announced promising but early Phase 1 safety results for ENV-308, an oral drug engineered to mimic Lac-Phe — the "exercise in a pill" molecule Long's lab first characterized in 2022. The trial didn't test actual weight-loss or fitness effects, so the real thing isn't here yet — but Long, a scientific advisor to Enveda, calls it "an extremely exciting potential scientific breakthrough." Read more

Learn more

• Long Lab of Chemical Physiology
• An ‘Exercise Pill’ Just Cleared Its First Human Test (Gizmodo, 2026)
• A pill that mimics exercise? Early results on drug designed to maintain both weight loss and muscle mass (STAT, 2026)
• Peptides are everywhere. Here’s what you need to know. (MIT Technology Review, 2026)
• Influencers are promoting peptides for better health. What does the science say? (NPR, 2026)
• What doctors want patients to know about injectable peptides (American Medical Association, 2026)
• Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides? (The New Yorker, 2026)
• Peptides are buzzing: But what does the science say? (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Study of pythons’ extreme diet reveals new hunger-curbing molecule (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
• Unlocking the secrets of ketosis (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
• Weight loss caused by common diabetes drug tied to "anti-hunger" molecule in study (Stanford Medicine, 2024)
• Q&A: Unlocking the secrets of taurine in obesity control (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2024)
• Exercise and the brain (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)
• Lac-Phe mediates the effects metformin on food intake and body weight (Nature Metabolism, 2024)

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. 

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is one of the most promising new technologies in psychiatry. Essentially, it allows us to reach inside the brain, stimulate it, and alter the brain circuits that go awry in disorders like depression. 

As the late Nolan Williams once explained, we've known for a long time that mental health disorders are caused by changes in electrical circuits in our brains, until TMS came along, we didn't had a good way of nudging those circuits back toward healthier function.

But for all its promise, there is still much we don't understand about what exactly TMS is doing. We know it sends electromagnetic waves into the brain and changes the flow of electricity within. What we don't know is how it changes brain circuits and networks or why that helps treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or any of the other conditions where it's being used.

Today's guest, Corey Keller, is dedicated to addressing that gap. He's been developing methods for recording inside the brain to help us understand how treatments like TMS change our brain circuits and address psychiatric disease.

Learn more

• Stanford Precision Neurotherapeutics Lab
• Koret Human Neurosciences Community Lab
• Closed-loop Optimized rTMS for Depression (Stanford Medicine Clinical Trials)
• Probing the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and Central Executive Network for Improving Neuromodulation in Depression (Stanford Medicine Clinical Trials)
• Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
• Music supercharges brain stimulation (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
• How brain imaging is transforming mental health (From Our Neurons to Yours 2025)
• Psychiatry 3.0 (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2023)
• Stanford Psychiatry’s Corey Keller Awarded Grant to Research Biomarkers to Improve Efficacy of rTMS for Treatment-Resistant Depression (Stanford Medicine Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, 2026)
• Personalizing Brain Stimulation for Psychiatric Disorders: From Circuits to Closed-Loop Control (American Journal of Psychiatry, 2026)
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation with intracranial recording in humans and primates: a review (Brain: A Journal of Neurology, 2025)
• Neural effects of TMS trains on the human prefrontal cortex (Scientific Reports, 2023)

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. 

Back in the 1950s, doctors didn't know a whole lot about the heart. If someone came in with chest pain, clinicians would ask a few questions, then take a stab at treating what might be heartburn or a heart attack. 

That's where mental health care is today, according to today's guest, Leanne Williams.

For example: you come into a psychiatrist’s office. The psychiatrist determines that you’ve experienced five or more depressive symptoms for at least two consecutive weeks and you get a diagnosis of major depressive disorder. Maybe you get prescribed some combination of therapy and medication. For some it works. For others it doesn’t. On average, finding an effective treatment for depression takes patients about 7 years – one of the reasons we’re in a mental health crisis.

Williams says that the key issue is that psychiatry does not base its diagnoses or treatment plans on any direct test of the organ of interest: the brain. According to Leanne’s research, people with depression actually fall into clearly different categories, caused by changes in specific brain networks that can be  seen using brain imaging. She’s shown that using this data can lead to much more targeted and effective therapies.

Williams leads the Precision Mental Health Center at Stanford and is helming a new international task force that aims to create a road map for transforming  mental health diagnosis and treatment based on biological data and brain imaging. We invited Leanne on the show to tell us about a sea change she sees happening in psychiatry.

Learn more

• Stanford Center for Precision Mental Health
• Stanford PanLab: Personalized and Translational Neuroscience Lab
• Reimagining mental health: Stanford Medicine experts chosen to lead precision task force (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Depression's distinctive fingerprints in the brain (From Our Neurons To Yours, 2024)
• Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression can lead to lasting changes in the brain (Stanford Report, 2024)
• A study identified 6 types of depression. Here’s why that matters (CNN, 2024)
• Leanne Williams receives $18 million NIH grant to diagnose and treat depression (Stanford Report, 2024)
• Brain scans could help personalize treatment for people who are depressed or suicidal (Science, 2019)
• The Precision Mental Health Commission: transforming mental health through brain circuit science (Nature Mental Health, 2026)
• Personalized Treatment Selection in Depression Using Clinically Interpretable Neuroimaging Biotypes (Biological Psychiatry, 2026)
• Personalized brain circuit scores identify clinically distinct biotypes in depression and anxiety (Nature Medicine, 2024)

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. 

Why does being sick make you so exhausted – and why does that exhaustion sometimes outlast the illness itself? Today, neuroscientist Julia Kaltschmidt returns to the podcast to talk about the body's hidden "sickness reflex," the gut-brain circuitry behind it, and what those things might reveal about chronic fatigue.

Kaltschmidt, a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute faculty scholar and professor of neurosurgery at Stanford Medicine, is an expert on the enteric nervous system — the gut's own semi-independent network of 200 to 600 million neurons. She's leading a new Big Ideas in Neuroscience project mapping out exactly how the body tells the brain it's sick, alongside Luis de Lecea, an expert in the brain circuitry of sleep, and Christoph Thaiss, who studies communication between the gut, the immune system, and the brain.

The team believes that understanding the "reflex" of sickness fatigue could eventually lead to something patients with chronic fatigue and long COVID don't currently have: a real biomarker, and a path to treatment, for a condition that's too often been dismissed as "all in your head."

Learn More

• Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
• Your gut – the second brain? (Our first conversation with Julia Kaltschmidt)
• The gut's 'second brain' (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Discovery sheds light on earliest development of gut motility (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)
• Neuroscience sheds light on childhood gut disorders (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)
• Could boosting gut–brain communication prevent memory loss? (Podcast episode with Christoph Thaiss)
• Why sleep keeps us young (Podcast episode with Luis De Lecea)
• New Science Shows Immune "Memory" in the Brain (Quanta Magazine, 2021)
• Insular cortex neurons encode and retrieve specific immune responses (Cell, 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.