From Our Neurons to Yours

Tom Clandinin, a Stanford neurobiologist whose work explores how brains wire themselves and endure over time, examines aging as an interconnected ecosystem. He discusses why neurons must last a lifetime, the brain’s immense energy demands, and how genetic changes ripple through cells and circuits. The conversation also explores AI-powered models, mosaic experiments, and earlier ways to detect neurodegeneration.

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

Jonathan Long, Stanford pathology professor studying peptide biology and exercise molecules like Lac‑Phe. He discusses how GLP‑1 drugs reshaped peptide therapeutics. New tech is revealing many more peptides than expected. He explains where Lac‑Phe comes from, how it may curb appetite, and why researchers are pursuing exercise‑mimetic drugs while urging careful validation.

Corey Keller, associate professor at Stanford studying intracranial and noninvasive recordings to improve neuromodulation. He discusses how TMS works in the brain. He explores biomarker-driven personalization, invasive recordings that reveal timing and pathways, translating signals to scalp EEG, and how music and brain state can boost plasticity.

Leanne Williams, psychiatrist and neuroscientist leading Stanford’s Precision Mental Health Center, discusses using brain imaging to define depression biotypes and personalize treatments. She explains why symptom-only diagnoses fail, how distinct brain circuits map to different depression types, and how imaging could guide faster, more targeted therapies and scalable clinical deployment.

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

For decades, the field focused on the plaques and tangles of misfolded proteins that show up in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other disorders. The natural assumption was that if you could design a drug to clear out that gunk, you could save the brain. But so far, that bet hasn't paid off.Now, researchers are taking a big step back and asking whether the plaques aren't a culprit, but rather a clue pointing to something more fundamental going wrong in our brain cells as we age? Put another way, why do our brains get jammed up with these junk proteins in the first place?Today’s guest, chemical engineer and geneticist Monther Abu-Remaileh, is one of the researchers working hard to answer that question. His research goes deep on a tiny cellular structure called the lysosome, little sacs filled with acid and enzymes that break down worn-out proteins and cellular debris. The lysosome is like a sustainable recycling center for a major city, managing waste streams, recycling raw materials, and coordinating with the rest of the cell to keep things running – and when it breaks down, the whole cell starts to fail. Among other accomplishments, Abu-Remaileh, a member of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience Steering Committee, has developed clever techniques for probing the lysosome that have put him at the frontier of a transformation in how we think about the lysosome, a transformation that could point the way to slow all manner of neurodegeneration – or even prevent it from happening in the first place.Learn MoreFrom humble beginnings to unlocking lysosomal secrets (ASBMB Today, 2026)‘You can literally lose who you are’ (Stanford Report, 2025)Driver of neurodegenerative diseases revealed (Stanford Engineering, 2023)New atlas could help researchers studying neurological disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)Sifting through cellular recycling centers (Stanford Engineering, 2022)Lysosomal metabolomics reveals V-ATPase- and mTOR-dependent regulation of amino acid efflux from lysosomes(Science, 2017)CLN3 is required for the clearance of glycerophosphodiesters from lysosomes (Nature, 2022)The Batten disease gene product CLN5 is the lysosomal bis(monoacylglycero)phosphate synthase (Science, 2023)The Bis(monoacylglycero)-phosphate Hypothesis: From Lysosomal Function to Therapeutic Avenues (Annual Review of Biochemistry, 2024)PLA2G15 is a BMP hydrolase and its targeting ameliorates lysosomal disease (Nature, 2025)Cell-type resolved protein atlas of brain lysosomes identifies SLC45A1-associated disease as a lysosomal disorder(Cell, 2026)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] more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

Cory Shain, neuro-linguist and Stanford assistant professor working on individualized language networks, discusses mapping where and how language lives in the brain. He explains multimodal approaches combining fMRI, MEG and intracranial recordings. Topics include individual variability in language topography, parallel processing across the language network, and using maps to guide speech-restoring brain implants.

Today's episode is all about how childhood literally shapes the brain.Our most important experiences – from learning to read, to the growing complexity of our social lives at school, and even the video games we play – leave physical traces in how our brains get organized that shape how we see the world as adults.But how does the brain actually know what parts of our lives are actually important enough to reorganize around? How do particular experiences get under the hood to leave their mark on the developing brain?Today's guest, Stanford psychology professor Kalanit Grill-Spector, has spent her career trying to answer these questions. She's has been imaging children's brains – from infants to teenagers – to watch this reorganization unfold. Her work focuses on how our visual experience as children shapes our brains and how we see the world – what she and her team have found is not always what they expected.Learn MoreThe Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab at Stanford Humanities and SciencesBrain's face recognition area grows much bigger as we get older (New Scientist, 2017)Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)Bridging nature and nurture: The brain's flexible foundation from birth (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex (Nature Human Behavior, 2019)Cortical recycling in high-level visual cortex during childhood development (Nature Human Behaviour, 2021)A unifying framework for functional organization in early and higher ventral visual cortex (Neuron, 2024)The emergence of visual category representations in infants' brains (eLife, 2024)White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth (Nature Human Behaviour, 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] more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. 

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 [email protected] more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.