Latent State

Paper discussed Taylor Webb, Shanka Subhra Mondal & Ida Momennejad (2025). A brain-inspired agentic architecture to improve planning with LLMs. Nature Communications . One-sentence summary This episode explores how a brain-inspired modular architecture, the Modular Agentic Planner, improves LLM planning by dividing the planning process into specialized components for action proposal, monitorin...

Paper discussed Mackenzie Mathis. Leveraging insights from neuroscience to build adaptive artificial intelligence . Nature Neuroscience , 2026. One-sentence summary This episode explores how neuroscience can inspire more adaptive AI systems by studying how animals learn online, update internal models, use prediction errors, replay memory, and adapt to changing environments. Key ideas Biological in...

Paper Denk, T. I., Takagi, Y., Matsuyama, T., Agostinelli, A., Nakai, T., Frank, C., & Nishimoto, S. Text-to-music generation models capture musical semantic representations in the human brain. Nature Communications. One-sentence summary A NeuroAI study shows that music-generation models can help reveal how the human auditory cortex represents musical meaning, linking music, language, and brai...

Paper:  Buzsáki, G. (2025). Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms.  Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 27 , 61–78.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00987-2 Key concepts:  Physical time (chronos), experienced time (kairos), Weber-Fechner law, logarithmic time organization, cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling, brain-body oscillation hierarchy, ripple oscillations, theta oscillations, ultraslo...

Paper: Engelen, T., Solcà, M., & Tallon-Baudry, C. (2023). Interoceptive rhythms in the brain. Nature Neuroscience, 26 , 1670–1684. Key concepts: Interoception, heartbeat-evoked response (HER), heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP), cardiac cycle effects, pulsed inhibition hypothesis, baroreceptors, nucleus tractus solitarius, pre-Bötzinger complex, nasal respiration, limbic entrainment, gastric sl...

What is the brain doing when attention drifts away from the task at hand? This episode explores a 2024  Nature Communications  study linking hippocampal sharp-wave ripples to naturally occurring self-generated thoughts in humans. Paper : Iwata et al. (2024). Hippocampal sharp-wave ripples correlate with periods of naturally occurring self-generated thoughts in humans.  Nature Communications , 15,...

A rat freezes to a tone it was never shocked with. It learned that the tone predicted a light, and separately that the light predicted a shock, and its brain built the rest. This is inferred fear: emotional memory assembled from pieces of knowledge that were never directly dangerous. A 2025 paper in  Nature  from Gu and Johansen at RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Wako City, Japan, identifies whe...

Think about a conversation that felt genuinely connected, where meaning was built between two people into something neither could have reached alone. And think about one that didn't, where, despite good intentions, something in the rhythm was off, the timing never synced, the understanding never quite landed. What's the difference? It might not be what was said. It might be when. In Episod...

Episode 3: The Pleasure Equation Paper: Cheung, V.K.M., Harrison, P.M.C., Meyer, L., Pearce, M.T., Haynes, J.D. & Koelsch, S. (2019). Uncertainty and Surprise Jointly Predict Musical Pleasure and Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Auditory Cortex Activity. Current Biology, 29 , 4084–4092. Key concepts covered: IDyOM, Shannon entropy, information content, musical expectancy, reward prediction error, nu...

You've had this experience. Stuck on a problem for days. Nothing connects. And then — not at your desk, not during your scheduled thinking time — something shifts. The pieces lock together with a finality that feels qualitatively different from just figuring something out step by step. You know, immediately and completely, that it's right. That's the Aha! moment. The Eureka experience....

Your brain is not listening to this. It already guessed what you were going to hear — before you heard it — and it's just checking whether it was right. That's predictive coding theory. And in Episode 1 of The Latent State, we dig into the paper that tried to catch this process in action — in real primate brains, in real time, with 128 electrodes screwed directly into a monkey's skull. Because sci...