Dr. Paul F.M.J. Verschure / Prof. Dr. Tony Prescott / Dr. Anna Mura

The Convergent Science Podcasts on Mind, Brain and Technology

No. of episodes

120

Latest episode

2026-05-05

Where can you listen?

The Convergent Science Network (CSN) Podcast began in 2010 at the

Barcelona Cognition, Brain, and Technology (BCBT) Summer School, where

hosts Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott sat down with leading scientists right

after their lectures. BCBT turned into a series of annual schools on neuroscience,

robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and biology and is led by Anna

Mura. Recordings were done at the Fundació Phonos in Barcelona.

What started as informal post-lecture conversations has grown into an archive of

120+ episodes, featuring Nobel laureates, pioneering neuroscientists, roboticists,

and interdisciplinary thinkers from around the world. In 2021, the podcast

expanded with a new Collaboration series — produced in partnership with the

Ernst Strüngmann Forum — exploring how collaboration arises, and why it fails,

across business, government, science, art, health, and sustainability. This series

supported a multi-year project on understanding and advancing human

collaboration which was published in 2025 as “The Nature and Dynamics of

Collaboration” (https://esforum.de/publications/sfr34_Collaboration.html).

Across both series, the CSN podcasts work toward a multidisciplinary science of

mind and brain — one that breaks down the silos of single-discipline thinking and

pursues a new integrative, convergent paradigm in which insights emerge from

the meeting of concepts, methods, technologies, and data. The same agenda

drives the annual Living Machines conference, also organised by CSN, and the

Handbook of Living Machines we published in 2018

(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/living-machines-

9780199674923?cc=es&lang=en& a new edition is being produced right now).