Traditionally, we think of Parkinson's as a movement disorder—defined by slowed movement, stiff muscles, and involuntary shaking. But it turns out there are other symptoms that appear years or even decades before movement problems bring patients to the clinic: sleep disturbances, chronic constipation, and loss of smell.

For today's guest, these early symptoms represent an incredible opportunity to understand where Parkinson's begins and to identify patients much earlier in the disease.

Kathleen Poston is a neurologist and division chief for movement disorders at Stanford Medicine. She's also a member of the steering committee for the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience at Wu Tsai Neuro, and advises the Michael J. Fox Foundation and pharmaceutical companies on Parkinson's research.

We discuss why non-motor symptoms might hold the key to early diagnosis, how new biomarkers are redefining the disease, and whether Parkinson's might actually start in the gut.

Learn More

• Learn about Poston's research on her lab site
• Learn about the Stanford Lewy Body Dementia Research Center of Excellence
• Redefining Parkinson's Disease | Our previous conversation with Poston, in which we learned about a sea change in our understanding of Parkinson's Disease.
• Neuroscientists dive into the gut (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025) | Our 2025 Symposium explored how our brains and bodies communicate—and what that means for our health and well-being
• Parkinson’s comes in many forms. New biomarkers may explain why (Knight Initiative, 2025) | Blood and cerebrospinal fluid markers tied to inflammation and metabolism sort some patients into subgroups, a step toward predicting progression and tailoring care.
• A biological definition of neuronal α-synuclein disease: towards an integrated staging system for research (The Lancet - Neurology, 2024)
• International Working Group Proposes New Framework for Defining Parkinson Disease Based on Biology, Not Symptoms (Neurology Live article)

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

What if we could make the brain see-through? 

It sounds like science fiction, but it could revolutionize how we study the brain. 

Today on the show, we're talking with Guosong Hong, a faculty scholar here at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute who has a unique reputation for developing creative techniques that literally shed light on the brain—from using fluorescent nanomaterials and focused ultrasound to create a virtual flashlight inside the skull, to discovering a common food dye that temporarily makes skin, muscle, and even parts of the brain transparent. 

Now, Guosong and colleagues are taking this work to the next level through a Wu Tsai Neuro Big Ideas grant, genetically engineering mice to have see-through brains from birth. 

Learn More

• Q&A: 'To see is to believe'  (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
• Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2026)
• Researchers turn mouse scalp transparent to image brain development (Stanford Report, 2026)
• The future of transparent tissue (Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything Podcast, 2025)
• Non-invasive brain stimulation opens new ways to study and treat the brain (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
• Researchers make mouse skin transparent using a common food dye (Stanford Report, 2024)

Note: Episode transcript will be uploaded within 24-48 hours of publication

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.

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

Our memories and senses are deeply connected—like how a favorite song can recreate a whole glorious teenage summer. It turns out this relationship might extend beyond our five external senses to include our internal senses: the signals telling us what's happening inside our bodies, sometimes beyond the veil of conscious perception.

New research by Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute affiliate Christoph Thaiss suggests that losing these internal signals as we age — in part due to changes in our gut microbiome — could one reason why our memories decline as we get older. 

Today we're talking with Thaiss about his new study in Nature that traces a surprising path from gut microbes to memory formation in the mouse brain.

Learn More

• Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline, improved memory formation in aging mice (Stanford Medicine, 2026)
• Intestinal interoceptive dysfunction drives age-associated cognitive decline. (Nature, 2026)
• Christoph's presentation at Wu Tsai Neuro's 2025 Annual Symposium
• Neuroscientists Dive into the Gut (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2025)
• The Thaiss Lab at the Arc Institute
• Thaiss Lab publications

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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. 

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 atlas reveals predictive aging biomarkers in the killifish (Nature, 2026)

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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.

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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 the estrous cycle to control female mating behavior.
• Ladyman S.R., et al.  (2021) A reduction in voluntary physical activity in early pregnancy in mice is mediated by prolactin eLife 10:e62260 This is the research mentioned from Dr. Grattan’s lab showing that the hormone prolactin acts on the hypothalamus to reduce locomotor activity and anxiety-like behavior in pregnant mice.

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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)

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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. 

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. [PDF]

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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)

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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. 

Neuroscientists have spent the past few decades tracing the network of brain systems—some deep and emotional, and others more analytical and deliberate— that work together as we make tough choices like where to invest our money as well as more everyday decisions like which videos to watch online—or, for that matter, which podcast to listen to.

You can imagine that the ability to listen in on the brain systems that guide our choices might start to let scientists predict our decisions. But today's guest has taken this a step further, showing that measuring brain activity in just a few individuals can actually forecast widespread social behaviors, like which stock prices are likely to go up or down on the market, or which videos are likely to go viral. 

Join us as we talk with Brian Knutson, a professor of psychology in Stanford's School of Humanities and Sciences, about the frontiers of neuroeconomics, bridging psychology, economics, and neuroscience. 

Learn More

• SPANlab (Symbiotic Project on Affective Neuroscience)
• NeuroChoice: Eight years of forging connections to illuminate and empower choice (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
• Brain imaging links stimulant-use relapse to distinct nerve pathway (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2022)
• Brain activity data may improve stock market forecasts, study shows (The Guardian, 2021)
• Your brain knows whether a video will go viral online (Stanford Report, 2020)
• Odds are good that risky gambling choices are influenced by a single brain connection, Stanford research shows (Stanford Report, 2016)
• Smile boosts chances of getting a microloan, say Stanford psychologists (Stanford Report, 2015)
• Stanford scientists see how the brain makes environmental decisions (Stanford Report, 2015)

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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.