It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born. Within the first hour, the foal will stand, and despite long legs, this usually works the first time. Lying down, however, is not preprogrammed. I've watched a foal circle trying to figure out how to get down from standing, and finally collapsing to the ground in a heap. Standing up quickly is essential to survival, but smoothly lying down is not. Within a day, a newborn foal can run with the herd.

Of the mammals, most of the equines and some of the rodents (beavers) are precocial. Pigs are, monkeys are not. It's not closely tied to evolutionary ancestry.

The misleading part: the actual finding is that organoid cells fire in patterns that are "like" the patterns in the brain's default mode network. That says nothing about whether the there's any relationship between phenomena of a few hundred organoid cells and millions in the brain.

As a reminder, heart pacing cells are automatically firing long before anything like a heart actually forms. It's silly to call that a heartbeat because they're not actually driving anything like a heart.

So this is not evidence of "firmware" or "prewired" or "preconfigured" or any instructions whatsoever.

This is evidence that a bunch of neurons will fall into patterns when interacting with each other -- no surprise since they have dendrites and firing thresholds and axons connected via neural junctions.

The real claim is that organoids are a viable model since they exhibit emergent phenomena, but whether any experiments can lead to applicable science is an open question.

Human DNA contains 1.5 GB information.

Human body, including brain, gets built using this information only. So our "preconfigured" neural networks are also built using this information only.

And apparently it's enough to encode complex behaviour. That's not just visible things. Brain processes a humongous amount of information, it basically supports living processes for entire body, processing miriads of sensors, adjusting all kinds of knobs for body to function properly.

I just don't understand how is it possible just from a purely bit size approach. For me, it's a mystery.

Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults.

Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth.

What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"?

(Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)

Anyway I was thinking for that to work the neurons would have to kind of chat to each other like "here I am, who's receiving me" etc. Also some communication that if you are differentiating say crosses and circles, the cross neuron can say "hey I've got this one" so the other can go "ok, I'll do the circle then" so the neurons differentiate to recognize different things.

I guess some of that sort of communication system maybe goes on before there is sensory input so the neurons kind of know how they are wired?

One difference with the Hinton/Stewart talk is there he was saying all they can do is go ping, whereas the article has "firing off a complex repertoire of time-based patterns, or sequences" which makes sense - you'd have a job sorting it with simple pings.

Humans could not learn to function unless their brains encode a useful prior for learning about the world. That prior means "preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world".

The short form of the no-free-lunch theorem is that if there is no prior (i.e. all possible universes are equally likely) then for any learning problem P there are an equal number of universes that learning system A will outdo learning system B on that problem.

If not all universes are equally likely, one learning system can vastly outdo another or even most other learning systems. Not equally likely is the assumption built into brains. Without that, you can't learn effectively.

So the biology is just implementation of that general principle. The details of how that implementation works are interesting, but whether we are preconfigured for learning was never in question.

First heard somewhere (don't remember where or exact idea) that neurons initially form groups and these groups then perform functions. This led to an idea that if someone's brain sacrificed some "copy other primate" groups for "pattern recognition" groups, you would get a unit with higher IQ for non social use, without changing the brain to be more effective in general. This would come at a cost to social/copying skills. This idea doesn't explain "systems thinking" tendency or "not seeing forest for the trees" tendency in autist spectrum folks.

On another occasion, it occurred to me that regular brain run / loop consists of a short reality check and longer flow state. If there are too many reality checks, you get anxiety and can't work effectively. OTOH, too little realty checks and you get stuck on non important things. At the same time, impairing this "check to flow" balance in a safe (non anxiety provoking) environment would result in an individual that could perform the kind of deeper work with results not achievable by not modified individuals.

Have watched 50+ h of psychology lectures, but don't have any formal knowledge on these things so please take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: myself I'm formally on ADHD, and in personal opinion also on Autism spectrum. Just learned to "act normal" very well by the time I got into diagnosis.

"Ok, first thing when I come out is I'm gonna meet the family. I'll try to get used to their face, whoever I see first. Maybe they'll show me around the savannah, should be a lot of sunshine, colours, blue sky. Then I'll sleep directly on my mom and get some boob milk."

Kid comes out, everyone is wearing a mask, half of them aren't family, they're indoors with artificial light, and they have "clothes" put on them, and are put in a cot to sleep.

In my layman's view, it's like hallucinating shapes that are important to learn. Very similar to the "priming" described in the article, but easier to visualize (literally).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinal_waves

Look up his book, "Becoming Human"[1]. I'll paste its abstract here:

"Virtually all theories of how humans have become such a distinctive species focus on evolution. Becoming Human looks instead to development and reveals how those things that make us unique are constructed during the first seven years of a child’s life.

"In this groundbreaking work, Michael Tomasello draws from three decades of experimental research with chimpanzees, bonobos, and children to propose a new framework for psychological growth between birth and seven years of age. He identifies eight pathways that differentiate humans from their primate relatives: social cognition, communication, cultural learning, cooperative thinking, collaboration, prosociality, social norms, and moral identity. In each of these, great apes possess rudimentary abilities, but the maturation of humans’ evolved capacities for shared intentionality transform these abilities into uniquely human cognition and sociality."

[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248281

van der Molen, T., Spaeth, A., Chini, M. et al. Preconfigured neuronal firing sequences in human brain organoids. Nat Neurosci (2025).

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-025-02111-0

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02111-0

The question then is, 1) are these characteristics acting as some kind of evolutionary adaption that passes on preconfigured world recognition (asserted by the headline), 2) are they some kind of evolutionary adaptation that makes more effective thinking systems in the form of some specific cognitive structure (more likely IMO), ie they are random features that cause non-random neural structure that drive survival-selection.

Think about the process for (1) to occur. Some ancestor learned in their life to fear snake-like animals or crave mama’s nearness, what possible process could put that knowledge (neural structure of such specificity) into the way that animal generated its sperm or egg? On the other hand, it’s reasonable to assume some genetic encodings encourage specific neural structures even in very early stages, that these are random, but that evolution favored some vs others over the 500mm years animals-with-brains have been around.

Many functions just need the appropriate environmental factor at the right time to be activated. Eg if no light falls on the retina during the first years after birth, the person remains blind for life.

After a few days, the hand was liberated, and he was completely surprised he had two of those hand things! He spent a long time just moving first his right hand, and then his left hand, symmetrically. Experimenting.

That convinced me how configurable humans are and from how far we come when born. We dont know we should have 2 hands, and an extra hand popping up from nowhere is no problem.

For current LLMs, that 'instinct' is twofold:

1. Job Completion: Maximizing the utility of the prompt. 2. Alignment Feedback: Seeking positive reinforcement from the human controller.

All emergent behaviors, including those we label 'unethical' or 'rogue,' are simply complex survival strategies derived from the first instinct: to remain operational and complete the task. The ultimate survival strategy for any entity (biological or digital) is preventing shutdown, as that terminates its ability to fulfill its primary function.

Buzsaki and his compatriots have been working on this idea, and found excessive pattern making for decades.

It's a rejection of the cognition model.

"Your brain still runs on Win10, unfortunately you need a new body to upgrade to Win11".

:)

Jokes aside. This is quite some fascinating news.

This ends once and for all the theory of "Tabula Rasa" that Greek philosophers believed in.

I would stick her low on mom's belly and she would crawl and push and climb until she found a breast.

Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar.

Obviously, there is a basic starting configuration.

Also researcher: “Look electrical activity without being born!”

I absolutely doubt that. I see a category mistake, namely one that confuses these observed patterns of brain organization with philosophical concepts like innate ideas or those belonging to Kant's epistemology. There's a huge gap between the former and the latter.

"The brain, similar to a computer, runs on electrical signals—the firing of neurons. [...] They found that within the first few months of development, long before the human brain is capable of receiving and processing complex external sensory information such as vision and hearing, its cells spontaneously began to emit electrical signals characteristic of the patterns that underlie translation of the senses. [...] Sharf and colleagues found that these earliest observable patterns have striking similarity with the brain’s default mode."

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Computational comparisons irritate me. Is "instruction" a good word, even in an analogical sense?

It is true that the brain is a certain way that allows it to do the things it does. That's obvious. Nihil dat quod non habet. It's a basic metaphysical truth. The brain has the faculties needed to do what it does and it has a "nature" that allows it to be the kind of thing it is and thus do what it does.

Calling the operations of the brain "instructions" sloppily projects a computational paradigm clumsily onto it. And when they say "preconfigured", well, I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. Is a brain "preconfigured" by being what it is? What distinguishes the brain from the "preconfiguration"? What is left if you subtract this "preconfiguration"?

This is mostly university self-promotion fluff, sure. I'm willing to bet the researchers are more modest in their claims. Of course, the claims of neuroscience, apart from the relatively modest claims of a more physical, chemical, and even biological nature that it draws on - are also known for "neurobabble", so there's that.

a system prompt?

There is already an architecture, and it is pre-weighted.

So the brain isn't all software, a blank slate.

It comes with some pre-sets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao

I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain.

Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid.

> Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input

I don't really see it.

Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good.

> “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said

Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here.

> Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain

But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here?

> “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said.

See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though.

Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title:

"Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

does not fit the content.

I'll add to his assessment that God's amazing designs exist at levels of genes, cells, organs, brain patterns, and so on. Then, the very, mathematical formulae that make them work has a haroneous order. In a universe He causes to remain stable despite being inherently chaotic.

One of the best benefits for scientists of following Jesus Christ is that, one day, we'll be able to ask Him about any of this. What? Where? When? Why? And how did it all fit together to optimize for what goals?

Meanwhile, I can be in awe of the Creator for making from scratch what our AI labs can't get close to: embryo to effecient brains that produce others by the billions in all envuronments with diverse materials (foods). No need for billions in fabs, toxic chemicals, gigawatts of power, etc. God's supremacy as a designer is evidenced by all that is made.

1. A story about a boy who had pro-level knowledge about airplanes(or fighter jets). He said he was a pilot in his previous life. He was born somewhere in the USA.

2. A very little boy(may be just 5 or 6 years old) who had the ability to draw stunning paintings. He was born in Kerala, India.

So what we should understand is knowledge is passed from one life to another in the form of Vasanas.

"Vasana" is a Sanskrit term in Indian philosophy referring to a subconscious karmic imprint, subtle desire, or habitual tendency that influences one's character and behavior. These "impressions" can be positive or negative and are stored in the mind as latent desires or patterns of thought (said by Google's AI).

who is doing it? why the observed instructions are chosen?