Find out more about Steve at his website.
Things mentioned during the show:

Papers we talked about:

Publishing negative results!

Wagenaar, D. A., Pine, J., & Potter, S. M. (2006). Searching for plasticity in dissociated cortical cultures on multi-electrode arrays. Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine 5:16. Download


Solving the bursting neurons problem:

Wagenaar, D. A. Madhavan, R. Pine, J. and Potter, S. M. (2005) Controlling bursting in cortical cultures with closed-loop multi-electrode stimulation. J. Neuroscience 25: 680-68 Download


Training the cultured networks:

Chao, Z. C., Bakkum, D. J., & Potter, S. M. (2008). Shaping Embodied Neural Networks for Adaptive Goal-directed Behavior. PLoS Computational Biology, 4(3): e1000042. Online Open-Access paper, supplement, and movie.
Bakkum, D. J., Chao, Z. C. (Co-First Authors), & Potter, S. M. (2008). Spatio-temporal electrical stimuli shape behavior of an embodied cortical network in a goal-directed learning task. Journal of Neural Engineering, 5, 310-323. Download reprint (3MB PDF)


The richness of the bursting activity, and how to get good signals from neurons in dishes:

Wagenaar, D. A., Pine, J. and Potter, S. M. (2006). An extremely rich repertoire of bursting patterns during the development of cortical cultures. BMC Neuroscience 7:11.Reprint (2.79 MB PDF).
You can find tons (over 40GB) of data from that paper here.




Non-synaptic plasticity (what?!)

Bakkum, D. J., Chao, Z. C., & Potter, S. M. (2008). Long-term activity-dependent plasticity of action potential propagation delay and amplitude in cortical networks. PLoS One, 3(5), e2088. Online Open-Access paper.


DIY neuroscience: Backyard brains
Citizen neuroscience:

Elizabeth Rickers‘ citizen science efforts at Neuroeducate
Sapiens Labs
Steve’s lab provides open-source electrophysiology rig plans, called NeuroRighter.


Follow Steve’s Instrucable projects.

Go make Steve’s window light!
Or watch a time-lapse of him building an awesome work-bench
Here’s are detailed posters of his SunRisa sun-like alarm clock.



Extra fun stuff

The world-record setting skinny-dippers.
Pop-locking dancing robots!