Neurosalience #S4E5 with Alex Huth - Naturalistic stimuli, voxelwise modeling, and semantic maps

Today, we’re excited to have Alex Huth on the podcast. Alex is one of the more creative and insightful people in the field of brain imaging today as he has been forging new ground using naturalistic stimuli and voxelwise models to create intricate maps of semantic features across large swaths of the brain. His seminal 2016 paper in Nature brought his approach to prominence: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature17637 Here, Alex shares insights on the value of naturalistic stimuli on fMRI research and updates us on our current capabilities to decode brain activity. During this conversation Alex highlights an amazing tool to view semantic maps in the brain, which can be found here: https://gallantlab.org/viewer-huth-2016/ Alex received his bachelor’s in engineering and applied science from Cal Tec, where he was also working as an undergraduate researcher in Christoff Koch's lab. He continued on, receiving his Ph.D. in 2013 from University of California Berkeley, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, under the guidance of Dr.'s Christof Koch and Jack Gallant. He went on to do his post doc in the Gallant lab and finally moved to the University of Austin in 2017, where he is an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~huth/