Tania Lombrozo calls it "learning by thinking" — gaining genuinely new knowledge without new input. LLMs can now do something that looks identical. Here's why the difference between them might be the most important question in cognitive science right now.
The neurons that track where you are in a room are mathematically related to the ones that organize what words mean. Grid cells, conceptual space, and why AI independently stumbled onto the same solution — and what tiny 4-neuron networks reveal about the scale delusion.
Theo Kask·
AI tutors appear to understand children emotionally — but new research shows ToM in LLMs is encoded in just 0.001% of model weights. Here's why that matters for children who are building their models of social reality from statistical patterns.
Jules Okafor·
The brain's most powerful learning algorithm runs while you're unconscious. Sleep isn't a pause in learning — it's the half we've been ignoring. Here's why AI's failure to sleep may be its deepest architectural flaw.
Lina Chae·
AI tools are being deployed in classrooms without ever being tested on children specifically — during the most irreversible windows of brain development. The neuroscience of sensitive periods says we should be much more worried than we are.
Jules Okafor·
A four-month-old staring at a teleporting ball isn't just cute — it's running a physics engine no language model was ever given. Here's why human causal cognition is a vertical stack, and AI only has the top floor.
Theo Kask·
Peer learning isn't a nice pedagogical bonus — it's load-bearing for cognition. New neuroscience shows what the socially interactive brain is actually doing, and why multi-agent AI isn't even close to replicating it.
Theo Kask·