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Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
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.
> It's interesting seeing what comes built-in. You can see this if you watch a horse being born.
A fascinating example of this are some Labrador retrievers. Labs are descended from a Newfoundland "landrace" of dogs known as St Johns Water Dogs. They have multiple aquatic adaptations: the "otter tail", oily fur, and webbed feet. (Some of these are shared with other water-oriented breeds.) Some lines of Labradors, especially the "bench" or English dogs, normally retain this full suite of water adaptations.
But the wild thing about these particular Labradors is that they love to swim, and that most of them are born knowing how to swim very well. But they don't know that they know how to swim. So many a young Lab will spend a while standing on the shore, watching humans or other dogs in the water, and fussing because they don't dare to join the fun. Then they may (for example) eventually lean too far and fall into shallow water. Within moments, they'll typically be swimming around and having the time of their lives.
The near-instant transformation from "fascinated by water and fearing it" to "hey I can swim and this is the absolute best thing ever" is remarkable to watch, though not recommended.
I remember another Lab, who'd been afraid to go swimming, who one day impulsively bolted for the water, took an impressive leap off a rock, and (from his reaction) apparently realized in mid-air that he had no idea what he was going to do next. Once he hit the water, he was fortunately fine, to the great relief of his owner.
CAUTION: This behavior pattern is apparently NOT universal in Labs. Owners of "field" or American Labs seem to have much better thought-out protocols for introducing hunting dogs to water, and failure to follow these protocols may result in bad experiences, dogs that fear water, and actual danger to dogs. So please consult an expert.
One of the most curious things I learned about babies is that they are born with a walking instinct, long before they actually can walk. If you hold them up, they will move their legs in a perfectly correct walking fashion. But they lack the strength and agility to keep their body up. At around 3 months this walking instinct disappears, and then at around a year we 'relearn' to walk when we have the strength and agility to hold ourselves up.
But if we were on a planet with significantly lower gravity, humans would likely be walking very near immediately.
One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.”
A three day old horse can walk.
A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.
But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
IIRC Andrej Karpathy in a recent talk made a point that reading a book isn't like memorizing the book, it's more like prompting the brain with the book.
So maybe this concept of being ready to go at birth isn't about the animals ability to start doing things but just a way of upbringing regardless of how ready the animal is to function. Maybe pigs just start prompting early. AFAIK human babies can swim right out of the womb. In other words, maybe the distinction between precocial and non-precocial(I don't know if there's a word for that) animals isn't that clear?
I have an anecdote that sounds like it fits this...
The house I used to live in had a ton of blue tailed skinks around it. You could always spot a baby by its size and brightness of the blue in its tail (juveniles have a brighter hue, adults are more brown). To avoid birds, the skinks would do this shimmy under the siding of the house just across from my back porch. What surprised me is that even the babies, maybe a few days old, all knew how to do the siding shimmy. Young, old, didn't matter, you could tell they just knew how (and why) to do it.
I'm immediately fascinated by what I imagine are core questions explored by this domain. Largely the trade-offs. It's almost like choosing to ship a product with a hard-coded configuration vs. a more complex "discover and self-calibrate" phase.
Would the trade-off be that precocial animals are generally "configured" for the environments in which they've evolved? If I birth (well, not me directly) a foal on the moon, will it adapt to the different gravity in the first hour or is that something that's "built-in" to their programming?
Are these built-ins easy to override or modify? Maybe an animal being precogial doesn't negatively impact its ability to also be adaptive, which I think I'm making a big assumption on already.
You forgot to mention the most important part: Those animals are the norm, it's us humans who are the outliers! Of course we have remnants of this knowledge and models of the world that formed our ancestors DNA for Millions of yers in us. Our ancestors newborns were as independent as these other animal children.
The only difference is that our heads are too big, so we are born prematurely. The term precocial is misleading. We aren't the norm, we are the outliers, human newborn's are not a blank plate, basing your models of intelligence and learning on the assumption we are the best fit for survival in a world is bogus.
> Some animals are ready to go as soon as they are born. These are called precocial animals. They are born knowing how to walk.
Early young borns that could walk, like a baby giraffe or baby rhino, often fall down or get exhausted quickly initially; tons of youtube videos show that. Humans are slow learners here, but I would not call these other animals as "born knowing how to walk" if their initial steps are so insecure. Their body structure is different though - a newborn human is basically pretty crap-built. A baby deer kind of is built differently on birth and that also makes sense if you are threatened by other predator animals like wolves or bears or lions.
> They are born knowing how to walk
Most animals know how to walk. They have pre-build 'knowledge' and start with it when they get muscles. The main difference is some species develop muscles before they are borne. Others don't, some can't even see. But as soon as they develop they can walk without even seeing how others do it. The same way birds can learn, or be trained to fly without seeing examples. They start flapping both wings in sync, this is pre-build.
The title is misleading, and HN comments don't seem to relate to the article.
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.
How newborn brain works is absolutely fascinating for me. I just don't understand how is it possible.
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.
This seems like it was proven ages ago with the no-free-lunch theorem.
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.
Kant said it first! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-reason/
It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input.
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.)
There was quite an interesting discussion with Hinton explaining to Jon Stewart how he thinks of brain function, kind of anthropomorphising neurons as things that can see patterns and all they can do is go ping when they see one (https://youtu.be/jrK3PsD3APk?t=366) So if one in the retina say pings if it sees a line and then one behind might see a pattern of a horizontal line ping and a vertical line ping and ping for a cross.
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.
Wow! Some years ago I was thinking about reasons for why people on ADHD/autism spectrum are different.
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.
I don't know if it's comedy or tragedy, but I've often considered the situation of what a newborn is "expecting".
"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.
I've always found Retinal Waves[1] interesting. During development of the visual system, there are spontaneous bursts of activity without external stimuli, helping the synapses to organize properly.
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).
Maybe I’m overlooking something, but wouldn’t this be similar to an instinct that is preprogrammed from natural selection? For example, sea turtles know they need to move from the beach toward the ocean, and spiders know how to spin their species specific web pattern. No-one teaches the sea turtles or spiders how to do this. Wouldn't this be the same for our thoughts and thinking?
Seems reasonable our grey mass needs a bootloader.
When my son was born, he was early and had a bit of a rough start, so his left hand got a bunch of oxygen and hearth sensors attached. To make sure they stayed there, the nurses taped his left hand to his breast.
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.
Related: I don't see a mention of Michael Tomasello. He did some good work in comparitive studies of other primates and humans. One of his main ideas is how "joint attention" is what separates humans from the Great Apes.
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."
No. The headline does not match the justification in the article. The organoid brain tissue is not hooked up to sensory mechanisms in its first months, I accept that, but they are under the influence of input-output training in their initial structure which would reasonably form some non-random pattern of weights, due to characteristics of the cells.
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.
When we consider that our brain creates our interface to the world via senses, predictive modeling, and learning, vs. "seeing the world directly as it is", it stands to reason that evolution by natural selection has favored certain configurations that make the human organism more successful than not. Our brains "simulate" the world in a way that is useful for the human organism to be successful in it.
I think this is obvious , otherwise how can we able to breathe once we are born ? Its same for all animals i think
I think the term 'Pre-configured Brain' is a perfect analogy for what an LLM’s underlying utility function is—a philosophical 'basic instinct' that governs all behavior.
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.
"Now, science is getting closer to answering the questions philosophers have pondered for centuries."
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.
The overhaul of the Tinbergen/Maturana idea of a blank slate operating on stimuli is not new at all.
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.
There is a large set of patterns deep ingrained/hard-coded in the human brain's neuronal structures. From hormone-metabolic reflexes like hunger, cold and sex (after puberty), to feelings (eg universal recognition of the mother's face), to the future language and speech. This is nothing new and is well studied across many species.
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.
Isn't this obvious? We have physics models within our DNA, social models, LLMs of course do not, not even after "training". Children of other animals are born at a much later developmental stage and are more independent, so it's all in our common ancestors design. Merely because of our big heads we humans are born prematurely and thus seem so helpless and "dumb", but we are not a blank plate at all. Why do people think that despite what they've learned in biology class?
Here's the paper:
van der Molen, T., Spaeth, A., Chini, M. et al. Preconfigured neuronal firing sequences in human brain organoids. Nat Neurosci (2025).
Involuntary muscles and nerves are 'preconfigured', and there are many, many of them, probably the vast majority of what your body does. Your heart doesn't learn how to beat, or from another perspective, you don't learn how to beat your heart.
Nothing in the study actually supports the claim in the headline and much of the text, though.
This would appear to be further validation of the "Perception is controlled hallucination" theory. Sensory input is secondary and serves only to correct our evolutionary developed predictive processing.
OMG a new chapter of eugenics.
"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.
The patterns are interesting, but they don’t imply “instructions.” Networks with thresholds self-organize long before they do anything meaningful. Good developmental signal, not evidence of built-in knowledge.
This is something that I always couldn't quite figure out about evolution: How are LEARNED behaviors, i.e. the "software" running on the brain on boot-up, encoded into genes?
So basically the brain has "firmware" we're born with, as well as the "software" we install as we grow.
Sounds a bit like Chomsky's Universal Grammar.
I remember testing the "breast crawl" in my first child.
I would stick her low on mom's belly and she would crawl and push and climb until she found a breast.
Every species is preconfigured. With some, it's more obvious than others (mating rituals, for example).
Obviously, there is a basic starting configuration.
Sounds a lot like someone read Kant and said "Let's check how categories could work!"
Researcher: “Don’t worry, perfectly ethical.”
Also researcher: “Look electrical activity without being born!”
This is why Metaverse never really took off. Our brains are just ready for it.
A brother in Christ told me that cell phones start working the moment you turn them on. He said that's because the designer of the phones built in a program that tells them how to operate. Likewise, our Designer (God) gave us a program for how to operate. It also has built-in morals of seeking God (who made me?), love, and fairness. That hints at the creation's purpose.
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.
"Critique of pure reason" by kant sounds a lot like this.
In hindsight, the previously scientific conception that Humans were somehow different than animals and that we don't have things like instincts comes across as incredibly foolish and not a little bit conceited.