Modeling Vision - Psychedelics & Philosophy - Learning & Sleep

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/03/nx-s1-5729433/ai-brain-monkey-neurons

Scientists make a pocket-sized AI brain with help from monkey neurons

Jon Hamilton

A human brain consumes less power than a light bulb, while artificial intelligence systems guzzle electricity to do the same tasks.

Now, scientists have created a highly efficient AI model that hints at how living brains are able to do so much with so little, a team reports in the journal Nature.

The model, which mimics a part of the brain's visual system, started out using 60 million variables. But the team was able to compress it into a version that performed nearly as well using just 10,000 variables.

"That is incredibly small," says Ben Cowley, an author of the study and an assistant professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. "This is something we could send in a tweet or an email."

The compact model also appears to work more like a living brain, which could help scientists study what goes wrong in diseases like Alzheimer's, Cowley says.

More broadly, if the AI model really does replicate strategies found in nature, it could help scientists understand the inner workings of human brains, says Mitya Chklovskii, a group leader at the Simons Foundation's Flatiron Institute, who was not involved in the study.

Compact, biology-inspired models of the brain could also lead to "more powerful and more humanlike artificial intelligence," says Chklovskii, who is also on the faculty at NYU.

    © 2026 npr


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https://nautil.us/doing-science-and-philosophy-on-drugs-1271005/

Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs
 
    By Nick Hilden 

Since the start of the so-called psychedelic renaissance some 25 years ago, writers have tackled the subject from the vantages of science, politics, mental health, productivity, creativity, spirituality, how-to, and even cooking. With his new book On Drugs, Justin Smith-Ruiu explores these powerful drugs through a philosophical lens, analyzing their effects and implications via thinkers spanning Foucault to Freud, Spinoza to Sartre, and scores of others who over the past 2,000 years have sought to explain the mysteries of the human experience.

While authors have applied philosophy to psychedelics before, they have typically done so through the framework of mental health or otherwise medicinal frameworks, while Smith-Ruiu is more interested in treating psychedelics as philosophical objects worthy of examination in and of themselves. At the same time, he follows the drugs down the rabbit hole, sizing up what psychedelics taught him on a personal level, and delving into questions surrounding the scientific prohibition of auto-experimentation, whether the hallucinations conjured by psychedelics are real or imagined, and what they have to teach us about the nature of reality.

A professor of history and science, Smith-Ruiu has previously applied philosophical analysis to some of the most pressing issues of our day. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he explored how the internet arose from some of our deepest philosophical yearnings. In Irrationality, he asserted that human irritation is fundamental to the human experience rather than a contextual social aberration. And in Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, he argued that our contemporary conceptions of race are not innate but rather emerged from the modern scientific efforts to classify and systematize. (He also happens to have an asteroid named after him—it doesn’t get much “higher” than that.)

© 2026 NautilusNext Inc.,
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/sleep-problem-solving-tool-lucid-dream

The right sounds may turn sleep into a problem-solving tool

By Bethany Brookshire

When solving a puzzle, the answer could lie in your dreams.

In a study of lucid dreamers, playing soundtracks linked with unsolved puzzles helped the sleepers solve the problems the next day, researchers report February 5 in Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Stories of brilliant insights after a nap or daydream abound, but scientists have struggled to successfully influence people’s dreams and rigorously test the idea. “This study provides one of the first experimentally grounded demonstrations of such a link,” says Giulio Bernardi, a cognitive neuroscientist at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, who was not involved with the work. 

Whether we remember our dreams or not, we have countless dreams in our sleep, according to Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist who performed the study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “Your dreams are such a big part of your inner life,” she says.

And in the right circumstances, manipulating those dreams could help people think of problems in new ways.

While some scientists have shown that sleeping on a problem increases the odds of solving it the next day, others have shown no benefit. Of course, it might help only if you actually think about the problem in your sleep.

Konkoly and her colleagues were especially interested in helping sleepers think about specific topics using targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. “It’s this research technique where you have a sensory stimuli that’s associated with a memory,” Konkoly says. “It could be a very soft sound or a smell that’s presented to a sleeper, and it functions to remind the sleeping brain of the full memory.” While people dream in every stage of sleep, the effects of TMR have been strongest in deep, slow-wave sleep, she says. Konkoly wanted to look at the effects of TMR at a different sleep stage — rapid eye movement sleep, which could be helpful for creative thinking.

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