BI 101 Steve Potter: Motivating Brains In and Out of Dishes

April 06, 2021 01:45:22
BI 101 Steve Potter: Motivating Brains In and Out of Dishes
Brain Inspired
BI 101 Steve Potter: Motivating Brains In and Out of Dishes

Apr 06 2021 | 01:45:22

/

Show Notes

Steve and I discuss his book, How to Motivate Your Students to Love Learning, which is both a memoir and a guide for teachers and students to optimize the learning experience for intrinsic motivation. Steve taught neuroscience and engineering courses while running his own lab studying the activity of live cultured neural populations (which we discuss at length in his previous episode). He relentlessly tested and tweaked his teaching methods, including constant feedback from the students, to optimize their learning experiences. He settled on real-world, project-based learning approaches, like writing wikipedia articles and helping groups of students design and carry out their own experiments. We discuss that, plus the science behind learning, principles important for motivating students and maintaining that motivation, and many of the other valuable insights he shares in the book.


The first half of the episode we discuss diverse neuroscience and AI topics, like brain organoids, mind-uploading, synaptic plasticity, and more. Then we discuss many of the stories and lessons from his book, which I recommend for teachers, mentors, and life-long students who want to ensure they’re optimizing their own  learning.

0:00 – Intro
6:38 – Brain organoids
18:48 – Glial cell plasticity
24:50 – Whole brain emulation
35:28 – Industry vs. academia
45:32 – Intro to book: How To Motivate Your Students To Love Learning
48:29 – Steve’s childhood influences
57:21 – Developing one’s own intrinsic motivation
1:02:30 – Real-world assignments
1:08:00 – Keys to motivation
1:11:50 – Peer pressure
1:21:16 – Autonomy
1:25:38 – Wikipedia real-world assignment
1:33:12 – Relation to running a lab

Other Episodes

Episode 0

November 26, 2024 01:49:07
Episode Cover

BI 199 Hessam Akhlaghpour: Natural Universal Computation

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information,...

Listen

Episode 0

July 31, 2024 01:41:03
Episode Cover

BI 190 Luis Favela: The Ecological Brain

Support the show to get full episodes and join the Discord community. Luis Favela is an Associate Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. He is...

Listen

Episode 0

November 27, 2019 01:15:24
Episode Cover

BI 054 Kanaka Rajan: How Do We Switch Behaviors?

Kanaka and I discuss a few different ways she uses recurrent neural networks to understand how brains give rise to behaviors. We talk about...

Listen