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 More

• The Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab at Stanford Humanities and Sciences
• Brain'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)

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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.

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 More

• The Heifets Lab at Stanford Medicine
• FDA 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.edu

Learn 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 More

• Eshel's Stanford Translational Addiction and Aggression Research (STAAR) Lab
• Why 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.edu

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