neuroscience

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

Joe Rogan interviews Matthew Walker, Berkeley neuroscience professor and author of Why We Sleep. They discuss what sleep does for the brain and body, the effects of sleep deprivation, and sleep myths.

Andrew Huberman introduces how the nervous system produces sensation, emotion and behavior, and how neuroplasticity lets us change it. It covers neurons, synapses, brain chemicals and the rhythms governing focus, learning and sleep.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

The opening lecture of Robert Sapolsky's Stanford course on Human Behavioral Biology, explaining the course premise and how to avoid categorical thinking. It starts a roughly 25-lecture series on how biology, genes, hormones and environment shape behavior.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Gary Wilson's TEDxGlasgow talk argues that internet pornography hyperstimulates the brain's reward system and can cause symptoms that reverse when people stop. TED notes that several claims are not supported by respected academic studies.

Andrew Huberman's long Huberman Lab episode is a masterclass on dopamine. It covers the neural circuits, peaks and baselines, dopamine depletion, and 14 tools for motivation, focus and avoiding addiction.

Andrew Huberman's podcast episode on what makes us sleepy, helps us sleep soundly and keeps us alert. It lays out the science and a set of behavioral tools such as light timing.

CGP Grey explains split-brain patients, where severing the corpus callosum lets the two hemispheres act independently. He uses this to explore the idea of two minds in one head.

A two-hour Huberman Lab podcast episode on the physiological effects of alcohol on the brain and body at different levels of consumption. It covers genetic predisposition to alcoholism, alcohol metabolism, and how it causes cellular stress and changes thinking and behavior.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how the body's stress response, evolved for short-term physical emergencies, harms long-term health when triggered by psychological stressors. It was given as the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture.

Dr. Howard Schubiner presents his research that much chronic pain comes from learned neural pathways rather than structural damage, and outlines a treatment approach based on that view.

A NOVA documentary with neuroscientist Heather Berlin exploring the subconscious and what drives our decisions. It uses sleepwalking, anesthesia, improvised rap in an MRI and game theory to probe how much of the brain's work is hidden.

A Huberman Lab podcast episode on the gut-brain axis and how the gut microbiome affects the nervous system, hunger and overall health. It covers the pathways by which the gut influences the brain and practical steps for gut health.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired. It is part of his human behavioral biology course.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

An RSA Animate summary of Iain McGilchrist's lecture on the divided brain, arguing the brain's two hemispheres attend to the world differently and that this has shaped culture and society.

Andrew Huberman discusses ADHD, its biology and myths, behavioral and pharmacologic treatments, and training protocols to improve focus for people with or without ADHD. It covers dopamine and the coordination of brain networks.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Neuroscientist Karl Friston gives a 15-minute talk on the free energy principle, covering Markov blankets, Bayesian model evidence and global brain theories.

A dialogue with Gary Weber on the default mode network, meditation and non-dual awakening, with discussion of psychedelics, thought and time. It is part of the Non-Dual Couch series.

A long Huberman Lab episode laying out science-based daily tools for focus, sleep, exercise and mental and physical health, organized around a 24-hour day.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

Sebastian Seung's TED talk introduces the connectome, the map of neural connections he argues defines each person. He explains how mapping it could change how we understand brains and minds.

A Huberman Lab episode on setting up a workspace for productivity, focus and creativity, covering light, posture, movement and sound. It touches on ideas like ceiling height and the effect of screens on the brain.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

Joe Rogan interviews Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky about his book Behave. They discuss the biology of human behavior, including toxoplasmosis and risk-taking, and baboon troop dynamics.

Psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett presents her research on what emotions are, arguing that the brain constructs them rather than reading them off faces. She says this means we have more control over our emotions than we think.

A two-minute BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where what you see of a speaker's mouth changes the sound you hear.

A video arguing that exercise matters for the brain as much as the body, linking movement, the nervous system and BDNF to learning and memory. It draws on research connecting complex movement to brain development.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.

A 60 Minutes Australia segment on people with highly superior autobiographical memory, who can recall the details of any day of their lives. It presents the rare phenomenon through interviews with people who have it.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant shows how fMRI brain mapping can be used to decode what a person sees, with visualizations of brain activity and its implications.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

An old lab video of a decerebrate cat walking on a treadmill and shifting between gait patterns as the speed changes. It is used to illustrate that much locomotion control comes from the spinal cord and body mechanics rather than the brain.