#3 ESI SyNC 2023: Bats, memory & interdisciplinary science

A couple of weeks ago, I visited the ESI SyNC 2023 conference in at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) in Frankfurt, Germany. Their topic was "Linking hypotheses: where neuroscience, computation, and cognition meet".

During the conference, I got talking to Yossi Yovel (Tel-Aviv University) about how different bat species navigate, what their vocalizations tell us about language evolution, and discussed his recent paper on whether we will ever be able to talk to animals. On the last point, I have some strong thoughts - thoughts including Wittgenstein and crows (see my own article here).

I also chat with Francisco Garcia-Rosales (ESI) on his poster about oscillations in the bat auditory and frontal cortex, and how bats and marmosets are really good animal models for speech (and maybe language).

Sarah Robins is a philosopher at Purdue University. Based of fMRI studies, many neuroscientists have grouped memory and imagination as a single phenomena. Sarah has been busy disentangling the two and we discuss how constructivist accounts of memory might have gone too far when abandoning memory traces.

David Poeppel (ESI) has a lab on auditory cognition, music, speech and language and how they map to neurobiology. Yet, going beyond that David has some intriguing thoughts on what's missing in neuroscience more generally. We dig deep into why we need a theory of memory storage/retrieval ("engram renaissance") and how to do interdisciplinary science.

For Apple Podcast users, find books/papers links at:

https://akseliilmanen.wixsite.com/home/post/pod03

• Yossi's Website
• Twitter: @YovelBatLab
• Yossi's talk available here in October-ish
• Mentioned books/papers:
• Genzel et al., 2018 - Neuroethology of bat navigation paper
• Yovel et al., 2023 - AI and the Doctor Dolittle challenge paper
• Amit et al., 2023 - Bat vocal sequences enhance contextual information independently of syllable order paper
• Khait et al., 2023 - Sounds emitted by plants under stress are airborne and informative paper
• My article: Talking to a crow will be possible in 50 years




• Francisco's LinkedIn
• Twitter: @fgarciaro92
• Mentioned books/papers:
• García-Rosales et al., 2023 - Oscillatory waveform shape and temporal spike correlations differ across bat frontal and auditory cortex preprint




• Sarah's Website
• Twitter: @SarahKRobins
• Sarah's talk available ⁠here⁠ in October-ish
• Mentioned books/papers:
• Robins, 2022 - Episodic memory is not for the future book chapter
• Ménager et al., 2022 - Modeling human memory phenomena in a hybrid event memory system paper
• Robins, 2023 - The 21st century engram paper
• Brigard, 2023 - Counterfactual Thinking paper




• David's Website
• Twitter: @davidpoeppel
• Mentioned:
• Gallistel, 2021 - The physical basis of memory paper
• Poeppel et al., 2022 - We don’t know how the brain stores anything, let alone words paper
• Recent talk⁠ by Hessam Akhlaghpour on an RNA-Based Theory of Natural Universal Computation

• My Twitter @akseli_ilmanen
• Email: akseli.ilmanen[at]gmail.com
• The Embodied AI Podcast, my blog, other stuff
• Music: Space News, License: Z62T4V3QWL

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:55) - Yossi Yovel on bat navigation, calls & talking to animals

(00:44:45) - Francisco on calls and oscillations in bats and marmosets

(00:59:35) - Sarah Robins on engrams, memory & imagination

(01:39:00) - David Poeppel on why we need a theory of memory storage and retrieval