Shifting Code - Stupid Hot - Brain Implants - LLCs & Emotions

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01554-0

The brain’s code seems to be in constant flux. Neuroscientists are baffled

    Diana Kwon 

It is a dogma in neuroscience that certain brain cells respond in the same way to the same thing. Specific neurons always fire, for example, when we see particular shapes and colours; other neurons activate to swing an arm or wiggle a nose. The brain needs this stability, the theory goes, to respond to the outside world in a consistent way.

So, when neuroscientist Laura Driscoll began her doctoral research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2012, her first task was to establish this baseline by tracking the activity of individual mouse neurons over time.

To Driscoll’s surprise, the baseline kept moving. Over the course of several days, many of the cells’ responses had shifted noticeably. Neurons that had fired when a mouse was in a specific location on day one were barely responding in the same spot after a few weeks. “It absolutely defied all of our expectations,” recalls Driscoll, who is now at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington. “This was so surprising that my whole project changed.”

In 2017, she and her colleagues reported findings from that project that flew in the face of neuroscience dogma. Over a single day, neurons in the parietal cortex, a hub for processing sensory information, fired predictably in response to specific things, such as the position of the mouse in a virtual maze. But over the course of a few weeks, even though the task of navigating the maze remained the same, these activity patterns underwent major reorganization1. Some of the neurons stopped firing in response to stimuli that had previously activated them; others did the reverse. In groups of cells, however, patterns of neuronal activity remained more consistent over time. The results suggested that individual neurons might not have fixed roles, and that the response of single cells might be less important than the activity of whole populations.

© 2026 Springer Nature Limited

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https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/living-world/2026/heat-waves-scramble-animal-minds-trigger-aggression

They call it stupid hot for a reason: Heat muddles animal brains
 
By Marta Zaraska 05.19.2026

On a blazing hot day in South Africa, female southern pied babblers can’t think straight. The medium-sized black-and-white birds are trying to get at tasty mealworms behind a see-through barrier. On cooler days, the birds can quickly figure out that all they have to do is go around the small wall of plastic. But when the mercury goes up, the birds just keep stubbornly pecking at the barrier.

That experiment is part of a growing body of research showing that animals get their minds muddled during heat waves. When it’s hot outside, birds struggle to learn, dogs bite more often, goat-like chamois pick fights. This is bad news not just for those who get on Fido’s toasted nerves. If the animals can’t stay alert enough to find food or avoid predators, their chances of survival go downhill, says Amanda Ridley, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia who coauthored the pied babbler study.

With climate change making heat waves more common, such cognitive impairments across the animal kingdom could ripple through entire ecosystems, putting already fragile species at greater risk. If pollinators forget which flowers to visit, crops and wild plants may fail. If birds can’t find food as easily, their young may not survive. And on a warming planet, a sharp mind is particularly vital. “A changing climate means that your ability to behaviorally adapt is even more important,” Ridley says.

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01468-x

China moves AI brain implants from trials towards real-world use

    Xiaoying You 

Chinese companies are racing to develop and deploy artificial-intelligence powered brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) that can help people to move, speak and control devices.

BCIs, which link a person’s brain to an external device or a computer using sensors placed around or inside the head, have been used in people who are paralysed and those with neurodegenerative diseases over the past decade.

In the past few years, companies, mostly in China and the United States, have added large language models to their brain devices. This enables scientists to decode brain activity more accurately than can be achieved using conventional signal-processing and data-analysing technologies, says Li Haifeng, a neuro-computing scientist at Harbin Institute of Technology in China.

In China, trials in small numbers of people are underway and some AI-powered brain devices will soon be sold to the public.
First trials in people

NeuroXess in Shanghai is one company in China that has run small clinical trials, including on their AI-powered brain implant can assist people with paralysis. The implant is placed in a shallow recess in the skull, and its sensors are fitted on the brain’s outer layer, called the cerebral cortex. The system is then connected by wire to a data transmitter that doubles as a battery, which is embedded in the recipient’s chest.

In a trial in October, a 28-year-old man with a spinal cord injury who was fitted with the brain implant was able to control appliances by moving a computer cursor with his thoughts to turn them on and off using an app.
© 2026 Springer Nature Limited

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/emotion/what-can-ai-teach-us-about-emotions/

 What can AI teach us about ‘emotions’?

By Nicole Rust

Anthropic’s artificial intelligence (AI), Claude, like other large language models (LLMs), appears to express emotions ranging from joy to despair when interacting with human users. In a report the company shared in April, researchers examined the model’s inner workings to understand why these emotional expressions happen and what they reflect about how Claude works. They concluded that these emotional displays are nontrivial, reflecting more than simple repetitions of patterns in Claude’s training data (the common pairing of the phrases “rainy day” and “feeling sad,” for example).

At the same time, they found no evidence that Claude has genuine feelings like our own. Instead, Claude’s emotion equivalents contribute to its ability to adaptively solve complex problems. Like human emotions, this adaptivity comes at a cost, sometimes leading Claude to make irrational decisions. We should not conflate Claude’s emotions with our own, but studying emotion equivalents in Claude and other AIs can help lay the foundation for understanding the mysterious, multifaceted functions that emotions serve in humans.

To understand Anthropic’s claims about Claude, we first need to grapple with its definition of “emotion.” For many, the term implies an inner experience—feelings such as happiness, fear or despair. But that is not the only way to define it.

Consider “memory.” Like emotion, memory can refer to an inner experience: When we remember, we experience something. Yet when we talk about the memory of our laptop—having it retrieve an image, for example—we do not think of it as having an inner experience. In this second sense, memory is defined functionally; it is simply the capacity to store information for later recall and use.

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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