What happens to the temporary scaffolding cells that help build the brain during development, and could their remnants explain cognitive disorders? Neuroscientist Zoltan Molnar from the University of Oxford returns to the Convergent Science Network podcast after 11 years to discuss how transient cell populations in the subplate regulate cortical circuit formation, and why the prolonged timeline of human brain development may be both a vulnerability and an evolutionary advantage. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Zoltan Molnar, a leading expert on cortical development and subplate neurobiology at the University of Oxford, joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT school for a follow-up conversation more than a decade after his first CSN interview. The discussion centers on how the brain's prolonged developmental timeline, particularly in humans, creates extended periods where transient circuits coexist with maturing adult connectivity. Molnar explains that human brain development is remarkably prolonged compared to other mammals. Thalamic projections arrive near the cortex early but accumulate in the subplate for months before making their final connections, a process that takes hours in mice but months in humans. This raises fundamental questions about whether developmental time scales with life expectancy and whether a meta-level controller ensures stability during this extended self-organizing process. The conversation explores the subplate as a transient scaffolding layer: the earliest-generated neurons that receive the first synapses, guide thalamocortical connectivity, and then partially disappear through programmed cell death. Molnar argues that similar transient populations exist elsewhere, particularly in the thalamic reticular nucleus, which may serve as the subplate equivalent for corticothalamic projections. The discussion addresses an ongoing scientific debate about whether subplate cells truly disappear or persist into adulthood. Molnar presents evidence for preferential cell death between postnatal days 2-8 in rodents, while acknowledging that subpopulations born at different times may have different fates. The remaining interstitial cells appear to regulate local arousal, attention, and sleep states in the adult brain. The broader implication is that abnormal development of these transient circuits may underlie cognitive disorders, connecting developmental neurobiology directly to clinical neuroscience. Part of the Convergent Science Network podcast series from the BCBT School.

What if the standard anatomical maps of the brain have been wrong for over a century, and the molecular evidence was there all along? Neuroanatomist Luis Puelles from the University of Murcia explains how developmental biology and gene expression mapping overturned the dominant columnar model of brain organization, revealing a segmental architecture that had been proposed and forgotten decades earlier. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Luis Puelles, one of the leading figures in developmental neuroanatomy, joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the Convergent Science Network podcast to discuss his career-long effort to replace the columnar model of brain organization with a prosomeric model grounded in embryological evidence. The conversation traces Puelles' intellectual trajectory from an initial interest in how the mind emerges from the brain, through frustration with psychology disconnected from neurobiology, to decades of work on the spatial organization of the developing neural tube. The central argument is that brain boundaries are transversal to the neural tube axis, not longitudinal as the dominant American school proposed since 1910. Puelles describes how he arrived at this conclusion through morphological observation of embryos long before molecular genetics provided confirmation. When gene expression mapping became possible, the data immediately validated his model, showing that genes code for boundaries exactly where his framework predicted them. The conversation explores the historical context of the competing columnar model proposed by Herrick, which extrapolated brainstem nerve component analysis to the entire forebrain without embryological support. Puelles explains why this model persisted for 60 years despite being inconsistent with developmental biology: it offered functional interpretations that appealed to the field, even though those interpretations lacked causal mechanisms. His collaboration with molecular biologist John Rubenstein proved pivotal, combining Puelles' morphological expertise with gene expression data that other embryologists had dismissed as meaningless. The discussion addresses the relationship between structure and function in neuroscience, with Puelles arguing that understanding morphology requires understanding development, and that functional analysis must be consistent with the causal mechanisms operating in the embryo. Part of the Convergent Science Network podcast series from the BCBT Winter School.

How do you track what an animal's brain is doing when the animal itself is moving through space in complex ways? Neuroscientist Jonathan Whitlock from NTNU Trondheim describes the technical odyssey of building a markerless motion capture pipeline for rats, and explains why simplifying your behavioral paradigm can unlock deeper scientific insights. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Jonathan Whitlock, who studies neural representations of posture and movement in the posterior parietal cortex, joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the Convergent Science Network's Alicante Cognition, Brain and Technology Winter School. The conversation explores the practical challenges of tracking animal behavior with enough precision to decode neural signals, and how those challenges led Whitlock toward a radically simpler experimental approach: having rodents chase a visual target on a screen. The discussion opens with the technical hurdles of markerless motion capture. Whitlock's lab spent years trying different marking methods, from tattoos to retroreflective paint to infrared pigments, before settling on marker-based tracking. Synchronizing neural recordings with postural data proved equally difficult, with months of data initially unusable due to insufficient temporal alignment. The payoff was substantial: discovering that even primary sensory areas encode body posture, something invisible without precise 3D tracking. The conversation then pivots to Whitlock's new paradigm: a prey-chasing task where rodents pursue a moving dot on a screen, reinforced by medial forebrain stimulation. This approach collapses the behavioral problem to two variables, distance error and heading error, while tapping into innate predatory intelligence honed by evolution. Mice and rats learn the task rapidly with minimal training, demonstrating anticipatory behavior and strategic pursuit. The discussion draws connections to predation research using crickets, subcortical circuitry in the superior colliculus and amygdala, and the broader question of how to balance technical complexity against scientific clarity. Whitlock argues that the chasing paradigm opens access to forms of biological intelligence that have been optimized through natural selection, making it a goldmine for studying sensorimotor integration, prediction, and decision-making in freely behaving animals. Part of the Convergent Science Network podcast series from the BCBT Winter School.