11 articles
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·
Dyscalculia, autism, and dyslexia aren't just clinical categories — they're nature's lesion studies. What atypical development reveals about how minds are built, and what AI's own failure modes might be trying to tell us.
Lina Chae·
Around age two, you hit peak synaptic density. Then your brain spends the next two decades deleting connections on purpose. AI does the opposite — and that might be exactly the problem.
Theo Kask·
Babies know more than they should. AI knows less than it seems. The nativism-empiricism debate — is the mind born equipped or built from scratch? — turns out to be the organizing fault line of both developmental neuroscience and modern AI architecture.
Lina Chae·
Vygotsky noticed that children talk themselves through problems — and then stop. Chain-of-thought prompting in AI rediscovered the same trick decades later. Here's what the parallel reveals, and where it quietly falls apart.
Lina Chae·
The brain doesn't receive reality — it predicts it. What Piaget's infants and a context-limited transformer reveal about the architectural gap between biological and artificial intelligence.
Lina Chae·
A toddler generalizes 'dog' from 3 examples. AI needs millions. The reason might be that cognitive constraints — not capabilities — are what produce genuine abstraction.
Theo Kask·
During sleep, your hippocampus runs a selective replay of the day's experiences to wire memories into your neocortex. AI has a pale imitation. Here's how far apart the two actually are.
Theo Kask·
Children have a supercharged window for learning motor skills, language, and movement. Deep neural networks face a strikingly similar problem — and the solutions emerging from neuroscience might hold the key.
Raf Delgado·