New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.
What function did ~100k-year-old engravings from Blombos Cave & Diepkloof serve? Decoration, identity marking, proto-writing? osf.io/preprints/ps... uses transmission chains + cognitive experiments to find out & help answering one of the hardest questions in cognitive archaeology. long thread! 1/
New preprint with Rafael Leite, Sandro Reia and Paulo Campos
Cumulative Cultural Evolution in Structured Populations
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
In which we take an old model of cumulative cultural evolution of mine and see what happens if you add social networks
Contribution to the collective defense provides both direct and indirect benefits and that individuals regulate their contributions mainly based on the social environment, resulting in variation within and among natural populations.
#Evolution #ComplexSystems
www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...
First "Civil War" among chimpanzees documented
Polarization led the Ngogo chimpanzees to form two factions that killed one another.
My opinion (in Spanish) here:
www.eldiario.es/sociedad/doc...
in @eldiario.es
by @aberron.bsky.social
(paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii). A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).
This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017). This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.
New paper out in Adaptive Behavior!
On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
“The rich complex nature of human social ecologies creates new challenges, which select for cognitive capacities that support distinctive forms of communication & facilitate creation of linguistic conventions in turn.” @thomscottphillips.bsky.social & co in a valuable eLetter response to our paper.🧪
When people use AI for writing assistance, it can shift their political attitudes by autocompleting sentences in biased ways.
Yet people are often unaware of the AI bias & it's influence
This is not merely about the facts presented, but how autocomplete worlds
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Title page for working paper: "The Varieties of Cultural Selection"
I've been thinking a lot about the foundations of cultural evolutionary theory. While there's been a lot of work on transmission mechanisms, there has been far less work on cultural *selection*. Here's a new working paper presenting a taxonomy of cultural selection processes.
osf.io/preprints/so...
Some evidence that humans have adaptations (immune & wound-healing responses) to better survive burn injuries than other primates
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Something to add to our paragraph on 'Fire-shaped humans'
academic.oup.com/bioscience/a...
🧪🌍🔥🏺 #ecoevo #evolution #Anthropology
Do plants develop cancer? Since trees live long and have many cells, shuld we expect to see "tumoral forests" as the on in the image (my drawing)? Spoiler: negative answers to both questions (with exceptions). Understanding why is a fascinating story @guimaguade.bsky.social
Finally! Here is our perspective on why cooperation maximizes diversity and how it promotes additional coexistence mechanisms that do not occur under competition
journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
This is a hard topic with strong opinions... Thanks @asn-amnat.bsky.social for publishing it! 🧵👇
Scandinavian Mesolithic hunter-gatherers abstractly engraved bones & other materials. What can we learn from their visual complexity? New paper w @ll-herskind.bsky.social , @helenamiton.bsky.social & @felixthehauskat.bsky.social . (doi.org/10.1016/j.ja...). 1/
Oh gosh. Remember the excitement about frontier models understanding medical images and acing tests? "In the most extreme case, our model achieved the top rank on a standard chest X-ray question-answering benchmark without access to any images." Fei-Fei Li is an author. arxiv.org/abs/2603.21687
What if intelligence comes from interaction rather than reasoning? In his early, provocative 1990 paper, Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence emerges from agents embedded in the world, tightly coupling perception and action instead of relying on abstract symbols.
www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/tea...
Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.
fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo...
I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study
1/
How are the fluctuations in electric field organized across the whole brain? We analyzed the 3.4 M samples from the international brain lab using a combination of deep learning and graph theory. We found a surprising structure made of communities and landmarks.
doi.org/10.1101/2025...
This is an awesome discovery:
A single-celled organism with no brain called Stentor seems capable of Pavlovian learning. Yes, it can actually learn to associate two things despite having no neurons.
My latest for @newscientist.com. 🧪 #science #memory #learning
www.newscientist.com/article/2519...
Thank you @arvidagren.bsky.social - I'm really looking forward to delving into this.
It’s clear to me that the argument is actually about what you think the point of doing research is. If it’s papers, AI will be faster. But I don’t think it’s papers I think it’s the process and I want to do that process
“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪
🔺 New preprint 🔺
Why does poverty increase time discounting?
With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can!
A quick 🧵
𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲
Giovanni Pezzulo et al introduce hierarchical model of goal attainment in PFC.
Looks very impressive.
#neuroskyence
arxiv.org/abs/2601.189...
I am assembling resources for @aial.ie to mitigate/reduce risks (due to our research) from potential:
1)retaliation, defamation lawsuit etc for work on politically charged topics
2)emotional harm from dealing with sensitive issues (CSAM, hate, etc)
know of any helpful resources? pls share/repost
According to this, just over a third of people (36%) think AI understands their emotions or is conscious.
58% trust AI chatbots to act in their best interests more than they trust governments to do so.
Writing is thinking
"On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models."
www.nature.com/articles/s44...
Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis
3/3 The key novelty is showing that genome instability is both relieved by sleep and sufficient to induce sleep in cnidarians, this implies that DNA damage was an ancestral driver of sleep evolution, long before brains or complex cognition existed.
