352 | Bing Brunton on Connecting the Connectome to the Body
4/27/20261 hr 14 min
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a long way from the final answer. A big next step is understanding how neuronal circuits connect to and guide bodily behavior. Very recent work on mapping the fruit-fly connectome has brought us closer to that goal. I talk with neuroscientist Bing Brunton about the connectome, how we can study it to understand bodily motion in flies and other creatures, and where it's all taking us.
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Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/04/27/352-bing-brunton-on-connecting-the-connectome-to-the-body/
Bing Wen Brunton received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from Princeton University.. She is currently a Professor of Biology and the Richard & Joan Komen University Chair at the University of Washington, with affiliations at the eScience Institute for Data Science, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Department of Applied Mathematics.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Sean Carroll· Host0:52
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. As you are listening to this podcast or listening to anything else or looking at anything else, your brain is processing information. We can argue about how much information is in the podcast or anywhere else, but in some sense, there are bytes of information being, uh, sensory inputted into your brain and then processed, and that affects what you do, how you behave. Now, as we've talked about in the podcast recently, um, there's other things going on in the brain and the nervous system and the body