Predicting the brain: the Stanford Digital Brain Project | Dan Yamins & Russ Poldrack

This week, Wu Tsai Neuro launched the Stanford Digital Brain Project, an ambitious effort to build predictive models of the human brain.

So today on the show, we’re bringing you two conversations to get you up to speed on what this new initiative is and why it matters.

First we’re going to revisit a conversation from last year with Wu Tsai Neuro Faculty Scholar Dan Yamins about the vision for building digital models of the brain. We talked about how such models would let neuroscientists test hypotheses about brain function or develop personalized interventions for brain diseases in a virtual environment far faster than can be done in the lab.

Then, in the second half of the episode, we'll bring you a conversation with cognitive neuroscientist Russ Poldrack, one of the leaders of the new initiative, about what it's actually going to take to build this thing. We talk about the experiments now getting underway to capture the brain data that'll be needed to train these models, and why collecting this kind of data is already a remarkable scientific undertaking on its own, well before anyone actually builds a model out of it.

Learn more

• Stanford Digital Brain Project to build predictive models of the human brain (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2026)
• Building predictive models of the brain (Stanford YouTube)
• Building AI simulations of the human brain (From Our Neurons To Yours, 2025)
• Neuroscientists use AI to simulate how the brain makes sense of the visual world (Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, 2024)
• AI models of the brain could serve as digital twins in research (Stanford Medicine, 2025) 
• The Yamins NeuroAI Lab
• The Poldrack Lab
• Dan Yamins on Substack
• Russ Poldrack on Substack

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