From Our Neurons to Yours Podcast By Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University Nicholas Weiler cover art

From Our Neurons to Yours

From Our Neurons to Yours

By: Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University Nicholas Weiler
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This award-winning show from Stanford’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute is a field manual for anyone who wants to understand their own brain and the new science reshaping how we learn, age, heal, and make sense of ourselves.


Each episode, host Nicholas Weiler sits down with leading scientists to unpack big ideas from the frontiers of the field—brain-computer interfaces and AI language models; new therapies for depression, dementia, and stroke; the mysteries of perception and memory; even the debate over free will. You’ll hear how basic research becomes clinical insight and how emerging tech might expand what it means to be human. If you’ve got a brain, take a listen.

© 2026 Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University
Biological Sciences Hygiene & Healthy Living Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Science
Episodes
  • Could boosting gut–brain communication prevent memory loss? A tale of microbes, memory, and our internal senses | Christophe Thaiss
    Mar 19 2026

    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

    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.edu

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

    Show more Show less
    43 mins
  • Why do some of us age faster than others? | Claire Bedbrook and Ravi Nath
    Mar 12 2026

    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

    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.edu

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

    Show more Show less
    38 mins
  • Big Ideas in Neuroscience: A new neuroscience of pregnancy
    Feb 26 2026

    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

    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.edu

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

    Show more Show less
    38 mins
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