We often think of the mind as something that passively perceives an objective world. | bit.ly/49UAMxr In this interview, neuroscientist Karl Friston argues that the brain is not a mirror of reality but a prediction machine, constantly constructing the world it

𝗦𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗱𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗮𝘀𝗸𝘀 More hidden markov models for cool behaviors doi.org/10.1016/j.neur…

"New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial layer of regulation." quantamagazine.org/once-thought-t…

"The minimization of prediction error in real brains and real bodies is a continuous dynamical process that is likely inseparable from its material basis, rather than a meat-implemented algorithm existing in a pristine universe of symbol and sequence." noemamag.com/only-what-is-a…

How the brain compresses visual features into concepts: A deep neural network-based computational framework When you recognize a face or a coffee mug, your brain performs something remarkable—it takes rich, detailed visual information and compresses it into abstract, meaningful

Every student learns that correlation does not imply causation. Few learn the converse: absence of correlation does not imply absence of causation. This essay traces how economics came to think about causality. The story involves philosophers, statisticians, econometricians, and

The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science 🧠 oecs.mit.edu

I am immensely proud and grateful to announce that, after three years of hard work, my paper on biological vs artificial intelligence has been accepted to the oldest and longest-serving scientific journal in existence: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

What's new in the science of mind? open.substack.com/pub/collosum/p…

Cover story | Why consciousness is the hardest problem in science | Scientific American | a great read scientificamerican.com/article/what-i… Suzanne Gildert

Why comparisons between AI and human intelligence miss the point theconversation.com/why-comparison… via The Conversation - Australia + New Zealand

"The Self-Evidencing Agent" - my new book - is out now with The MIT Press @mitpress.bsky.social.bsky.social Can be purchased, or just download the whole thing for free, via the 'Open Access' option I'm grateful to Anil Seth and Karl Friston for the generous endorsements mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553896/…

New preprint with Giovanni Pezzulo : arxiv.org/abs/2602.08079 Bootstrapping Life-Inspired Machine Intelligence: The Biological Route from Chemistry to Cognition and Creativity "Achieving advanced machine intelligence remains a central challenge in AI research, often approached

“Are [LLMs] conscious? We lack principled methods to tell [...] this lack of understanding is both scientifically and ethically problematic. Understanding consciousness through construction is the only path to resolving these questions with confidence.” cimc.ai/cimcWhitepaper…

“faster growth of the cortical layer caused the surface to buckle and form realistic folds. Differences between species were explained by variations in initial brain shape, and cortical growth rate, rather than by different folding rules.”  medium.com/brains-and-beh…

"We need to give models knowledge — rigidly described concepts and constraints, rules and relationships — that anchor their behavior to the realities of our world." undark.org/2026/02/19/opi…

Doing hard things builds neural adaptions to paradoxically make life easier.

This study shows that natural cyclical activation of large-scale brain networks drives key cognitive functions, revealing mechanisms of brain processing and suggesting that targeting network rhythms could help enhance cognition. nature.com/articles/s4159… #brain #neuroscience

Final version of this paper with Richard Watson is out! sciencedirect.com/science/articl… "Machines all the way up and cognition all the way down: Updating the machine metaphor in biology" (quite a bit different than the original preprint at osf.io/preprints/osf/…).

Perspectives for artificial intelligence in bioprocess automation sciencedirect.com/science/articl…