Further Reading.
N3: Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology.
https://www.darpa.mil/research/progra…
Advancements in neural closed-loop manipulations in awake, behaving animals.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…
INSIGHT: Universal Neural Simulator for Analog Circuits Harnessing Autoregressive Transformers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.
MouseGoggles: an immersive virtual reality headset for mouse neuroscience and behavior.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159…
Michael Levin is an American developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor. Levin is a director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. He is also co-director of the Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms with Josh Bongard.
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e Join TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org.
Timestamps:
00:00 — Intro.
00:30 — Biggest Myths of Biology.
07:18 — Tying Michael’s Work Together.
35:25 — Who Are We (Humans)?
56:10 — Cognition.
01:14:10 — Conscious Agents.
01:33:25 — Bioelectricity and Cancer.
02:16:15 — Support TOE
Join TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org.
Thanks to Ekkolapto! Ekkolapto is thinkubator that creates ecosystems for the most creatively intelligent to discuss their most unorthodox, interdisciplinary ideas to a critically receptive audience. Visit Ekkolapto at https://ekkolapto.org.
Links Mentioned:
Michael’s paper on cognition — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
Gabriele Carcassi Video — • Newtonian/Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics…
Michael Levin’s blog post on advice — https://thoughtforms.life/what-advice…
TOE ep with Levin, Tung and Gumuskaya — • New Groundbreaking Research, Anthrobots, H…
TOE ep with Levin — • Unveiling the Mind-Blowing Biotech of Rege…
TOE ep with Bach and Levin — • Michael Levin Λ Joscha Bach: Collective In…
TOE ep with Lang, Friston and Levin — • Levin Λ Friston Λ Fields: \.
In a small clinical trial, a CAR T-cell therapy—a type of immunotherapy that uses a patient’s own immune cells to fight cancer—shrank tumors in several children and young adults with diffuse midline gliomas. This fast-growing form of brain and spinal cord cancer typically causes death within a year of diagnosis.
In the trial, several participants were still alive 2 years or more after receiving the treatment.
Patients in the trial had a type of diffuse midline gliomas known as H3K27M mutant, a genetic change that is found in about 80% of younger patients with these cancers Exit Disclaimer. Researchers at Stanford University, who led the study, designed the experimental CAR T-cell therapy to target a molecule called GD2 that is produced in large amounts by H3K27M-mutant diffuse midline gliomas.
A new study shows how the brain abandons outdated strategies and adapts to new rules.
Most people have experienced the feeling: switching from one task to another, only to find the brain momentarily stuck in the old mode of thinking. Sometimes, even after realizing a strategy no longer works, the mind keeps returning to it anyway.
Neuroscientists call the ability to adapt and shift strategies “cognitive flexibility”—a core feature of higher cognition that allows the brain to abandon outdated rules and respond to changing conditions. Impairments in cognitive flexibility are associated with disorders including Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Insights from the Algonauts 2025 Winners.
https://arxiv.org/html/2508.10784v1
A foundation model of vision, audition, and language for in-silico neuroscience.
https://ai.meta.com/research/publicat…
How to breathe life back into brain theory.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d4158…
A foundation model to predict and capture human cognition.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
#ai #tech #explained #brain #artificialintelligence
People often look to dogs’ behavior, especially their facial expressions, for indications of their states of mind. Numerous studies show that this is a popular interpretation strategy. However, modern dog breeds vary greatly in size and structure, and few studies have explored how breed-specific morphology might affect humans’ ability to assess visual cues from the faces of different breeds of dogs.
Now, for the first time, a collaborative research team including scientists from Israel, Czechia, and Hungary has used eye-tracking to compare the visual attention patterns of humans observing photographs of normocephalic and brachycephalic dogs. A research paper detailing the team’s findings appears in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
While humans are acquiring new skills that entail performing coordinated movements, such as walking, playing an instrument or skateboarding, their brains are known to continuously detect mistakes and correct movements over time. This gradual acquisition of task-specific movements is known as motor learning.
Past neuroscience studies suggest that a brain region known as the cerebellum plays a central role in motor learning. The cerebellum is a structure at the back of the brain that contributes to coordination, balancing the timing of voluntary actions and the execution of precise movements.
This brain structure hosts a type of nerve cell known as Purkinje cells (PCs), which receive input information via climbing fibers (CFs), nerve fibers that originate from a lower region in the brainstem. Neuroscientists have hypothesized that climbing fibers also carry signals that instruct the brain to adapt to movements based on earlier mistakes.
Before you even know what a word means, your brain is already playing a rapid-fire game of linguistic LEGO. Discover how our minds secretly dissect words, piece by orthographic piece, in the blink of an eye.
Imagine catching a flash of the word football on a screen. Before you even register its meaning (“a game” or “a ball”), your brain may have already parsed it into “foot” + “ball.” A clever new experiment used red-and-blue anaglyph glasses and split-second word flashes to probe this. It found that real compound words (like football) are recognized much faster than lookalikes (like shamrock), suggesting our eyes and brain latch onto word form almost instantly.
In the lab, volunteers wore 3D-style red/blue glasses while words appeared for just 60 milliseconds under a mask. Each word was painted half red and half blue, splitting it either at a meaningful break or in the middle of a syllable. For example, “FOOT” might be blue and “BALL” red, or vice versa, sending “foot” to one hemisphere and “ball” to the other. Participants then quickly reported if what they saw was a real word or a made-up one.
