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Xaq Pitkow shares his principles for studying cognition in our imperfect brains and bodies

Pitkow discusses how evolution’s messy constraints shape optimal brain algorithms, from Bayesian inference to ecological affordances.

By Paul Middlebrooks
27 August 2025 | 107 min watch

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks is joined by Xaq Pitkow, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Pitkow is principal investigator of the Lab for the Algorithmic Brain, which focuses on the theoretical neuroscience of cognition. Guided by a few fundamental principles underlying how brains implement cognition, Pitkow is working to elucidate how organisms perform tasks using suboptimal strategies. He outlines the various ways brains may compute with probabilities, the changing landscape of neuroscience under modern machine learning, an ecological neuroscience approach and more.

 

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