Neil Fournier

This week feels like AGI meets sci-fi. First: @CorticalLabs ships the CL1 — real human neurons grown on silicon, running DOOM. A biological computer you can buy. (x.com/mastronomers/s…) Second: Eon Systems uploads a fruit fly. They took FlyWire's complete connectome — 130,000 neurons, ~50M synapses — simulated it with a biologically realistic neuron model, and connected it to a MuJoCo body. The simulated fly avoids toxic compounds. Sensory input to physical behavior, loop closed. (x.com/michaelandregg…) Same week. Two completely different paths to the same place. Cortical Labs (bottom-up): plate real neurons on a multielectrode array, give them a closed-loop environment, apply the free energy principle. No backprop. No gradient descent. They learn. The CL1 has ~800K neurons. The human brain has 86 billion. But the same principles apply. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228614/) Eon Systems (top-down): take the connectome — the wiring diagram — and run it as a simulation. No real cells. Just the map, instantiated in silicon, driven by spiking neuron dynamics from real electrophysiology. Wire the motor outputs to a physics engine. Watch it move. (FlyWire: doi.org/10.1038/s41586… | Shiu et al.: doi.org/10.1038/s41586…) One starts with biology and asks what it can compute. The other starts with the map and asks how to run it. Both are making the same bet: that the structure of biological circuits — not their wetware substrate — is where intelligence lives.

From "Dad of the Year" to deadbeat: What accounts for a doting father versus a negligent one? 🐭 New research in @Nature led by @Princeton’s Forrest Rogers finds a molecular “switch” in the brain that dictates paternal care in African striped mice. 📄: pni.princeton.edu/news/2026/maki…

@drrickbarnett Why can’t addiction be a behaviour that has biopsychosocial factors.

When we use a blanket phrase like “addictive behavior” we may be reducing a very complex bio-psychosocial-socio-emotional construct to a very limiting degree.

@StuartHameroff Stuart that is really fascinating. Do you know what the approx be a reasonable approximation of the electrical dipole moment of tubulin?

Excellent talk by George Mashour. Thank you. But 1) NDE/OBE and reincarnation could be veridical. Penrose put consciousness in Planck scale spacetime geometry which is inherently nonlocal, constrained by microtubules in the brain. When the energy and O2 run out, as the lowest energy process, consciousness is the last to leave. Membranes poop out first. Consciousness remains but then there is the gamma burst which may be the NDE. How is there gamma if membranes aren’t working? Microtubules don’t need membranes or external drives to generate gamma. In membrane-free preps they oscillate and radiate at 39 hertz. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30093720/ I’d bet there’s megahertz, gigahertz, terahertz etc in the burst. The quantum information in spacetime geometry leaving the microtubules may not dissipate, but remain entangled as a quantum soul. Here’s a paper I wrote about this with Deepak Chopra who covered the epidemiology and phenomenology. It uses Penrose OR but Roger doesn’t necessarily concur. researchgate.net/publication/27… 2) Prof Mashour said anesthetics have multiple mechanisms. Sorry but this is the fallback of rejecting the Meyer-Overton correlation which tells us all anesthetics have the same target, and that for each anesthetic its potency is the same for all animals. There is very likely one molecular site for anesthesia and consciousness in all animals. Evidence clearly points to microtubules inside neurons as the unitary target of anesthesia. Instead the authorities in anesthesia research dumped Meyer-Overton, the Rosetta Stone of consciousness, in favor of a mish mash of confusion. 3) The 5 theories of consciousness in the initial Templeton project included Orch OR but we couldn’t agree on a common experiment to refute one or the other. We met with IIT but it didnt seemfalsifiable. Templeton gave us $100k to 1) demonstrate warm temperature quantum process or state in microtubules which were 2) inhibited by anesthesia. We did it. pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ac…

@SpockResists @AbizaidAlfie

Trophy Drop-Off Centre. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500

@StuartHameroff I agree but there still is limited actual physical evidence of quantum events lasting for any meaningful duration in real intact tissue. Even if it could, what evidence is there that the collapse outcomes aren’t just random? This where I am not following your logic here

1) Probabilistic chaotic attractors can’t get you out of determinism. 2) Agency and causality require quantum state reduction whose choices are non-computably selected (Penrose, 1989). 3) Dopamine doesn’t give will, it gives pleasure which is the motivation for exerting or having will. 4) For many situations, measurable brain activity for conscious actions occurs after the reportedly ‘conscious’ response. This is interpreted as an unconscious response with a subsequent illusion of conscious control. But evidence suggests backward time referral mediated by quantum mechanisms in brain microtubules may rescue conscious free will. frontiersin.org/journals/integ…

Has anyone worked with the larger CCAC compliant DOUBLE DECKER cages for rats. Any thoughts or input?

@NTFabiano Not surprising but I would imagine that there it will be an inverted u shape function though.

The more intense the exercise the greater the antidepressant effect.

@NatRevNeurosci I love this idea and it makes a lot of sense given how glia form a syncytium

Astroengrams: rethinking the cellular substrate for memory — a Perspective by Javier Sánchez Romero & Marta Navarrete nature.com/articles/s4158…

How animals detect the Earth’s magnetic field remains a mystery in sensory biology. In a new Science study, researchers used whole brain activity mapping, tissue clearing, and light sheet microscopy to identify neuronal populations activated by magnetic stimuli in the pigeon. Learn more: t.co/DV1MEXigKV

By mapping the meanings of the words used to communicate emotions across more than one-third of the planet’s spoken languages, a study in Science found that there is significant variation in how emotions are expressed across cultures. #ScienceMagArchives scim.ag/4gGECui

@goddek Really? You must be either ignorant or really stupid if you actually believe this. Texas led the nation in active shooter events in 2024.

🇦🇺 Now imagine Australia hadn’t disarmed its population. This is what happens when the government and terrorists hold a monopoly on weapons. Law-abiding civilians are left defenseless, while those willing to use violence aren’t. THIS WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED IN TEXAS!

@StuartHameroff Interesting idea - is there evidence that microtubules can generate EM oscillations in vivo between kilohertz to terahertz range? Why do you think zero phase lag synchrony can't be explained by established neuronal network mechanisms?

The high frequency gamma waves look like a nested hierarchy. I’d bet higher frequency kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz and terahertz waves from microtubules also nested, accounting for zero phase lag synchrony and long range communication. Neurocomputation is obsolete.

We are actively recruiting graduate students in behavioural & systems neuroscience. Please share with any talented trainees that are looking for a position!

@DrNRouleau Prevent runaway excitation—seizure, maybe?

@FournierLab I can imagine times where you might want to solve this problem - where it might be advantageous to do so. I wonder if there are instances where the system should preserve delays in lieu of correcting for them, to some benefit?

Neuronal signals travel at 100 m/s. This does not scale to body size. Suppose humans and blue whales experience cause-effect relationships differently by virtue of their size alone? Imagine the range of experiences that exist from the smallest to the largest nervous systems.

@DrNRouleau Agreed. The same issues also occur with sense modalities as well as. Vision about 100 msec vs 20-50 msec temporal integration windows. I always find it incredible how the brain solves this.

@FournierLab Maybe not. But if some inputs are arriving with T1 delay and other inputs are arriving with much greater delay, and perhaps several synapses (imagine cranial nerve vs tail afferents), how does this impact downstream processing? Maybe body size matters less than brain dimensions.

Such a great time meeting up with my old lab mate and friend @jjb930 and seeing all of the incredible work his lab is doing.

@timgill924 I think with enough sophistication with the language an AI could certainly be programmed on some qualitative method and apply it at least in semi structured interview. Whether it will be reactive enough I don’t know. I think it could transcribe and analyze for content theme

@FournierLab In what regards?

AI can absolutely do bench lab experiments if you have an assistant who provides it with the data. That assistant eventually will be a robot, too. The only thing AI can’t do is collect qualitative social scientific data: ethnography, interviews, etc. Otherwise, it’s ready to go.