From Our Neurons to Yours

Last month we saw a big shift in the federal government’s approach to psychedelic medicine.Specifically, following an executive order by President Trump, the FDA announced it is fast-tracking its review of several clinical trials of psychedelic drugs for patients with mental health disorders. The executive order also directed more funds towards psychedelic research and a review of psychedelics’ status as highly restricted Schedule 1 substances. To help us understand what all this means for the future of psychedelic medicine and the neuroscience of psychedelics, we’re joined by Boris Heifets, an anesthesiologist at Stanford Medicine who runs a lab studying how psychedelics affect the nervous system and their impact on patients with psychiatric conditions.Learn MoreThe Heifets Lab at Stanford MedicineFDA plans ultra-fast review of three psychedelic drugs following Trump directive (Associated Press, 2026)Trump’s order on psychedelics could have far-reaching science consequences (Scientific American, 2026)Psychedelics, placebo, and anesthetic dreams (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2024)Pychedelics inside out — how do LSD and psilocybin alter perception? (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2024)The power of psychedelics meets the power of placebo (From Our Neurons to Yours, 2024)Magnesium–ibogaine therapy in veterans with traumatic brain injuries (Nature, 2024)Magnesium–ibogaine therapy effects on cortical oscillations and neural complexity in veterans with traumatic brain injury (Nature Mental Health, 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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Today’s episode is about the neuroscience of hard work—or maybe more specifically, the value we place on hard work.There’s something different about hiking to the top of a mountain versus taking a helicopter. The view from the top is exactly the same, but if you’ve done the hard slog to get there, the payoff is going to be much more rewarding. The question is, how does the brain know the difference? To answer this, we need to take a deep dive into the brain’s reward system, and one of our favorite neurotransmitters, dopamine. And it turns out, the way dopamine operates is more complicated than we thought.Our guest today, Stanford Medicine psychiatrist Neir Eshel, tells us about new research that’s starting to reveal exactly how the brain pushes us to work hard for the things that matter to us. Learn MoreEshel's Stanford Translational Addiction and Aggression Research (STAAR) LabWhy we value things more when they cost us more (Stanford Medicine, 2026)Cholinergic modulation of dopamine release drives effortful behaviour (Nature, 2026)Striatal dopamine integrates cost, benefit, and motivation (Neuron, 2023)Dopamine and serotonin work in opposition to shape learning (Wu Tsai Neuro, 2024)Why we do what we do (From Our Neurons to Yours, 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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Kathleen Poston, neurologist and Stanford movement disorders chief focused on Parkinson's biomarkers and early detection. She explores why sleep changes, constipation, and smell loss can surface decades before movement problems. The conversation digs into the gut and nasal routes, microbial signals, vagus nerve links, and how biomarkers and whole‑body studies could redefine where Parkinson's begins.

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 MoreQ&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 publicationSend 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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Christoph Thaiss, assistant professor and ARC Institute investigator studying gut–brain interactions. He discusses how age-related microbiome shifts can blunt internal bodily signals and alter vagus nerve communication. Conversations cover experiments linking aged microbes to memory loss in mice, identification of a culprit bacterium, inflammatory pathways that mute vagal signaling, and potential therapies like vagal stimulation and drugs.

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 MoreTo 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 predSend 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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn 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 labKatrin Svensson labLongzhi Tan labReferences: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 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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn 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 MoreMenon'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)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 neuronspodcast@stanford.eduLearn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

In this insightful discussion, Katrin Andreasson, a Stanford physician-scientist specializing in brain inflammation and metabolism, unveils a groundbreaking perspective on Alzheimer's disease. She argues that aging triggers an energy crisis in brain immune cells like microglia, which may contribute significantly to Alzheimer's pathology. Her research suggests that targeting inflammation beyond the brain can restore memory in mouse models. With a focus on new therapeutic strategies and the importance of curiosity-driven science, Andreasson offers fresh hope for Alzheimer’s treatment.

Jay McClelland, a leading cognitive scientist and Stanford professor, discusses the fascinating intersection of human and artificial intelligence. He explores how neural networks echo our brain’s workings and critiques traditional cognitive models. McClelland reveals insights on how children efficiently learn complex categories and how language shapes understanding. He suggests that coherent thought emerges from interactions, contrasting this with the limitations of current AI. His insights advocate for neuroscience-inspired advancements in building smarter machines.