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Michael Breakspear and Mac Shine explain how brain processing changes across neural population scales

Breakspear and Shine find a scale-free property of brain activity that is conserved across diverse species, suggesting that a universal principle of brain activity underlies cognition.

By Paul Middlebrooks
10 September 2025 | 85 min watch

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks is joined by Michael Breakspear, professor of systems neuroscience and principal investigator of the Systems Neuroscience Group at the University of Newcastle, Australia, and Mac Shine, research fellow at the University of Sidney. They discuss their systems neuroscience approach to understanding how complex brain function gives rise to cognition, using physics-inspired tools to probe the nature of brain processing from single neurons to whole brains.

Read the transcript.

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