For decades, the field focused on the plaques and tangles of misfolded proteins that show up in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other disorders. The natural assumption was that if you could design a drug to clear out that gunk, you could save the brain. But so far, that bet hasn't paid off.

Now, researchers are taking a big step back and asking whether the plaques aren't a culprit, but rather a clue pointing to something more fundamental going wrong in our brain cells as we age? Put another way, why do our brains get jammed up with these junk proteins in the first place?

Today’s guest, chemical engineer and geneticist Monther Abu-Remaileh, is one of the researchers working hard to answer that question. His research goes deep on a tiny cellular structure called the lysosome, little sacs filled with acid and enzymes that break down worn-out proteins and cellular debris. The lysosome is like a sustainable recycling center for a major city, managing waste streams, recycling raw materials, and coordinating with the rest of the cell to keep things running – and when it breaks down, the whole cell starts to fail.

Among other accomplishments, Abu-Remaileh, a member of the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience Steering Committee, has developed clever techniques for probing the lysosome that have put him at the frontier of a transformation in how we think about the lysosome, a transformation that could point the way to slow all manner of neurodegeneration – or even prevent it from happening in the first place.

Learn More

• From humble beginnings to unlocking lysosomal secrets (ASBMB Today, 2026)
• ‘You can literally lose who you are’ (Stanford Report, 2025)
• Driver of neurodegenerative diseases revealed (Stanford Engineering, 2023)
• New atlas could help researchers studying neurological disease (Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, 2026)
• Sifting through cellular recycling centers (Stanford Engineering, 2022)
• Lysosomal metabolomics reveals V-ATPase- and mTOR-dependent regulation of amino acid efflux from lysosomes(Science, 2017)
• CLN3 is required for the clearance of glycerophosphodiesters from lysosomes (Nature, 2022)
• The Batten disease gene product CLN5 is the lysosomal bis(monoacylglycero)phosphate synthase (Science, 2023)
• The Bis(monoacylglycero)-phosphate Hypothesis: From Lysosomal Function to Therapeutic Avenues (Annual Review of Biochemistry, 2024)
• PLA2G15 is a BMP hydrolase and its targeting ameliorates lysosomal disease (Nature, 2025)
• Cell-type resolved protein atlas of brain lysosomes identifies SLC45A1-associated disease as a lysosomal disorder(Cell, 2026)

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Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Right now, as you're reading this sentence, something remarkable is happening in your brain. Light waves from your screen hit your eyes, transform into electrical signals, and take on meaning. You understand what you're reading. This is language — our human superpower.

But despite 150 years of intensive research, we still do not have a complete picture of how the brain actually accomplishes all of this. We don't even have a good answer to a seemingly simple question: Where in the brain does language happen? It turns out, the answer may be different in different people.

Today we'll hear from neuro-linguist Cory Shain, one of the leaders of a new Big Ideas in Neuroscience project here at Wu Tsai Neuro that is combining multiple brain recording techniques to build individualized maps of the language network—and use these insights to improve brain implants for people who've lost the ability to speak or write due to brain injury or illness.

Learn more

• Laboratory for Computation & Language in Minds & Brains
• Laboratory of Speech Neuroscience
• Neural Prosthetics Translational Lab
• BrainGate
• How the Brain Processes Different Components of Language (Psychology Today, 2024)
• Big Ideas in Neuroscience tackle brain science of everyday life and more (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
• Study of promising speech-enabling interface offers hope for restoring communication (Stanford Medicine, 2025)
• The neuroscience of understanding (Stanford Momentum, 2025)
• Distributed Sensitivity to Syntax and Semantics throughout the Language Network(Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2025)
• Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2025)

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Today's episode is all about how childhood literally shapes the brain.

Our most important experiences – from learning to read, to the growing complexity of our social lives at school, and even the video games we play – leave physical traces in how our brains get organized that shape how we see the world as adults.

But how does the brain actually know what parts of our lives are actually important enough to reorganize around? How do particular experiences get under the hood to leave their mark on the developing brain?

Today's guest, Stanford psychology professor Kalanit Grill-Spector, has spent her career trying to answer these questions. She's has been imaging children's brains – from infants to teenagers – to watch this reorganization unfold. Her work focuses on how our visual experience as children shapes our brains and how we see the world – what she and her team have found is not always what they expected.

Learn More

• The Vision and Perception Neuroscience Lab at Stanford Humanities and Sciences
• Brain's face recognition area grows much bigger as we get older (New Scientist, 2017)
• Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
• Bridging nature and nurture: The brain's flexible foundation from birth (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2025)
• Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex (Nature Human Behavior, 2019)
• Cortical recycling in high-level visual cortex during childhood development (Nature Human Behaviour, 2021)
• A unifying framework for functional organization in early and higher ventral visual cortex (Neuron, 2024)
• The emergence of visual category representations in infants' brains (eLife, 2024)
• White matter connections of human ventral temporal cortex are organized by cytoarchitecture, eccentricity and category-selectivity from birth (Nature Human Behaviour, 2025)

Send us a text!

Thanks for listening! If you're enjoying our show, please take a moment to give us a review on your podcast app of choice and share this episode with your friends. That's how we grow as a show and bring the stories of the frontiers of neuroscience to a wider audience.

We want to hear from your neurons! Email us at at neuronspodcast@stanford.edu

Learn more about the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.