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David and I talk about his work to understand how sound waves floating in the air get transformed into meaningful concepts in your mind. He studies speech processing and production, language, music, and everything in between, approaching his work with steadfast principles to help frame what it means to understand something scientifically. We discuss many of the hurdles to understanding how our brains work and making real progress in science, plus a ton more.

Show Notes

• Visit David's lab website at NYU.
• He’s also a director at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics.
• Follow him on twitter: @davidpoeppel.
• For a related episode (philosophically), you might re-visit my discussion with John Krakauer.
• Some of the papers we discuss or mention (lots more on his website):
  • The cortical organization of speech processing.
  • The maps problem and the mapping problem: Two challenges for a cognitive neuroscience of speech and language.
• A good talk:
  • What Language Processing in the Brain Tells Us About the Structure of the Mind.
• NLP Transformer model:
  • How do Transformers Work in NLP? A Guide to the Latest State-of-the-Art Models.
  • Attention Is All You Need.