1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

Congratulations to our first #NobelPrize laureate of 2026 🎉 Early this morning Karl Deisseroth found out he was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He seems very happy with the news!

If someone had simply published an academic paper on transformers, no one would have cared. The impact has come from scaling it to solve actual problems. In neuroscience we similarly tackle problems at such a small scale (describing the neural correlate of percept X or task Y) that it's hard to make people care. It's hard to even know if any proposed algorithm is right. But I feel so inspired by what's happened in AI...if we also scale our efforts and aim for understanding the *full structure of the brain's model of world and self*, there actually is hope to solve the entire problem in our lifetime...and when we do, we will not only figure out intelligence (as LLMs have), but consciousness. What is the brain's algorithm for tracking a persistent piece of matter? What is the brain's algorithm creating programs with variable arguments? What is the brain's data structure for representing "I"? I am dying to know. Re the neural foundation model program: I think intelligently stitching data together across sessions and subjects is important, and foundation models are a good tool for that. But I absolutely disagree that they are an answer to understanding the brain.