130 - Laura Gwilliams: The Needles that Unraveled the Brain’s Language and What We Can Learn from Them

Anjie chats with Dr. Laura Gwilliams.  Laura is an assistant professor at Stanford University, jointly appointed between Stanford Psychology, Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute and Stanford Data Science. Her work is focused on understanding the neural representations and operations that give rise to speech comprehension in the human brain. In this episode, Laura introduces her recent paper titled” Large-scale single-neuron speech sound encoding across the depth of human cortex”. She shares the insights we can derive from a recently developed technique called Neuropixels, which is essentially a tiny needle that can be placed into the human brain and record from hundreds of neurons at the same time. She also shares her personal journey into this line of work.  If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but will allow us to reach more people and make them excited about psychology. Laura’s paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06839-2Laura’s personal website:https://lauragwilliams.github.io/Laura’s lab website:https://gwilliams.sites.stanford.edu/ Anjie’s: website: anjiecao.github.ioAnjie’s Twitter @anjie_cao Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPodPodcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) stanfordpsychpodcast@gmail.com