Morphospace / What's new

What's new

Latest from the Levin lab YouTube channel, newest first. Updated 2026-11-12.

Week of 2026-11-12: new in the feed

Captions came through for both new videos, so each has a summary page. No new papers or blog posts this week.

Published Video Who In brief
2026-11-11 Evidence for intracellular memory storage and its implications for AI David L. Glanzman (guest talk to the Levin lab), with discussion with Michael Levin A neuroscientist argues that memory is stored inside neurons rather than at synapses, and describes an AI system (Naresa, in a paper he says is on arXiv, so a preprint) in which each unit keeps its own transferable memory. In the discussion Levin ties it to memory remapping, anthrobots and a smoker-cell nicotine experiment he says has not been done yet.
2026-11-06 Super Turing Computing Hava T. Siegelmann (guest talk to the Levin lab), with discussion with Michael Levin Changing any one assumption of the Turing model (discrete values, determinism, a fixed program) takes a system beyond it. She describes stronger neural-network classes and wants AI whose inputs can change its program, that updates continually and spends effort according to difficulty. Q&A covers the Church-Turing thesis and what randomness adds.

Posts: - 2026-11-12, X: "A beautiful animal".

Week of 2026-11-05: new in the feed

Captions came through for all three new videos, so each has a summary page.

Published Video Who In brief
2026-11-05 Is consciousness popularity? Narcis Marincat (guest talk to the Levin lab), with discussion with Michael Levin Narcis Marincat, who studied psychology and neuroscience and later computer science and works in AI, presents his "popularity theory of consciousness". He starts from two ideas: cells, including neurons, are cognitive agents, and human society can be seen as an organism made of people. He then defines consciousness as the process by which information made by an organism's basic units becomes popular within that organism, and applies it to binding, the unconscious, the self and the hard problem. In the discussion Levin talks about frame rates of minds, training sets of logic sentences, a "boredom theory of aging" his lab is testing, and why he doubts that most of the universe is unconscious.
2026-10-31 Thoughts as Thinkers: biology & computer science of inspiration within & without us Michael Levin (talk given in a joint session; he says he is presenting "together with Chris") A 35-minute talk on what Levin calls "free lunches": abilities a system shows that were not paid for by design, natural selection or training. He walks through examples at every scale, from people with very little brain tissue and tadpoles that see through an eye on their tail, to molecular networks that learn, xenobots and anthrobots, and simple sorting algorithms that do things nobody coded. He argues these abilities come from an ordered space of patterns (the Platonic space) that should be studied systematically, and that inspiration in human creatives is the same thing at a higher level. This is a different upload from the 2026-10-16 "Thoughts as Thinkers" talk on this site.
2026-10-30 Conversation #1 with Martin Šolc: the law and diverse intelligence Martin Šolc (postdoc, Charles University Faculty of Law) and Michael Levin A legal scholar who works on civil and medical law asks how the law should sort new kinds of entities, such as AIs, cyborgs and animals, and says Levin's TAME framework (a way of measuring cognitive capacity whatever a being is made of) could help. He proposes four "legal recognition levels", from a plain thing up to full legal personhood. Levin argues our who-or-what language is too crude for a coming world of cyborgs and augmented people, that capability and the ability to suffer should be kept apart, and that the trait worth measuring may be the size of a being's "cone of compassion".

Papers, posts and blog: - 2026-11-04, preprint (not yet peer-reviewed): A topoietic model of collective morphogenesis and compartmentalization (Manicka, Levin). On X he shared it as a "New #preprint!" and quoted the abstract: "diffusion and geometry alone may suffice to make a collective both spatially organized and controllable through macroscale intervention rather than microscale engineering of its members." - 2026-11-04, preprint (not yet peer-reviewed): Neural Activation of Human Primary Intestinal Enteroendocrine L-cells (Lindsay, Zeve, Rudolph, Shepherd, Grossberg, Breault, Levin, Ingber). - 2026-11-04, blog: Interactive MindMap is online. On X: "Interactive mind-map of my current work", "work in progress." - 2026-11-01, X: "Claude made some visuals for my process of paper-writing, useful for students."

Week of 2026-10-29: new in the feed

Captions came through this week, so every new video has a summary page, and so do four earlier videos that were missing one (marked "earlier").

Published Video Who In brief
2026-10-29 Biomedical Synthetic Biology Lior Nissim (guest talk to the Levin lab), with discussion Lior Nissim, who runs a synthetic biology lab at the Hadassah medical center in Israel ("Dasa" in the captions), explains how his group engineers cells the way engineers build autonomous electronic systems: sensors, a processor and outputs. Most of the talk is about synthetic promoters, short DNA switches built to switch on only in certain cell states, and gene circuits that do logic inside cells.
2026-10-28 Physical Intelligence: thermodynamic roots of agency Benjamin De Bari-Cheung (Thomas Jefferson University), guest talk with discussion An ecological psychologist presents the "physical intelligence" program from his graduate work at the University of Connecticut, which looks for the roots of agency in thermodynamics. His main example is a non-living electrical system that grows tree-like structures, which he analyzes with the idea that systems tend toward the fastest rate of entropy production their circumstances allow.
2026-10-26 Perturbing Complex Networks Debanik Bhattacharjee (postdoc, Hebrew University), guest talk with discussion A postdoc whose PhD was on fluid flow through porous materials shows how he studies complex systems by disturbing them and reading the response. Most of the talk uses pore networks (oil and water moving through a chip of pillars) as a test bed, and he says he is starting to carry the same approach over to neural systems, with early results not ready to show.
2026-10-25 From Top-Down Physics to Diverse Intelligence Chris Fields (talk to the Levin lab group) Chris Fields builds on a forthcoming paper in the journal Mind and Matter ("Embodied Cognition, the Free Energy Principle, and the Unity of Science") that argues against physicalism, and places it in the lab's current Platonic-space discussions. He goes from the Platonic space to the space of current mathematics, to physics seen from the top down, to each observer's experiential world, and ends at panpsychism.
2026-10-17 (earlier) New Bodies, Unconventional Minds: a continuum of cognition (& consciousness) Michael Levin A short conference talk where Levin makes three claims: the focus on neurons is too narrow, the same reasons we credit other people with consciousness apply to many structures in the body, and physicalism is false "all the way down". He walks through learning in small molecular networks, xenobots and anthrobots, and his Platonic-space proposal, then closes with personal views on consciousness that he says he can't prove.
2026-10-17 (earlier) Decoding and Translating the Languages of Biology: towards de novo cell design Jian Shu (guest talk to the Levin lab) Jian Shu presents tools for measuring and redesigning cell states, aiming at designing new cells from scratch. He starts from iPS-cell reprogramming, moves to methods that use optimal transport on single-cell data to trace how cells change over time, and then to methods that predict gene expression from label-free images (Raman to RNA). He closes by calling for a shared, organized dataset of cell images and measurements so AI can suggest the next experiment.
2026-10-16 (earlier) Thoughts as Thinkers: the biology & computer science of inspiration Michael Levin Levin describes a research program to study inspiration and intuition in the lab. His two points: there is a non-physical component that standard physical and computational models don't capture, and inspirations and the agents who get inspired are not different kinds of thing but points on one continuum.
2026-09-02 (earlier) Deciphering Visceral Instincts Diego Bohórquez (guest talk) Diego Bohórquez, who grew up in the Amazon region of Ecuador, explains how the gut senses what we eat and tells the brain in real time. His lab found that certain gut lining cells have long arms that connect to nerves; he named them neuropods. Silencing them leaves mice unable to tell sugar apart, and a microbial protein sensed by these cells reduces appetite, which the lab calls the neurobiotic sense.

Papers and posts: - 2026-10-24, preprint (not yet peer-reviewed): Limb-localized induction of regeneration reshapes brain and amputation-site transcriptional states in adult Xenopus laevis. On X he summed it up: "yes, it knows. Also, lots of interesting transcriptional responses both in the limb and in the brain." - 2026-10-23, peer-reviewed: Reservoir Computing for Pattern Recognition and Time-Series Prediction Based on Nanofluidic Negative Differential Resistance (International Journal of Intelligent Systems). On X: "Final version is out". - 2026-10-23, X: on the cortical-cultures preprint (2026-10-16), "Ever wonder if eventually cells could be trained out of disease states? We're on the path; first steps" - 2026-10-26, X poll: "A: I believe our limited lifespan is good because finitude gives our life beauty and meaning" vs "B: I would be sad if the modern human embodiment went extinct and was replaced by something else" - 2026-10-26, X: on AI-generated emails, "I'm not a bio-chauvinist; I just want, whoever, to be informed and interesting before I engage"

Week of 2026-10-22: new in the feed

Captions could not be fetched that week. The three videos below now have summary pages (see the 2026-10-29 table above).

Earlier batch: the 10 most recent videos as of 2026-10-15

Published Video Who In brief
2026-10-15 Deep Learning in Biology Dr. Edo Dotan (guest talk to the Levin lab) Edo Dotan, a bioinformatics PhD working between natural-language processing and biology, explains how the language-model recipe carries over to DNA and protein sequences, and presents a system that reads a protein sequence and writes a plain-English description of what it does.
2026-10-11 Mind-Body Interface: an Experimental and Clinical Perspective Michael Levin and Karina Kofman An award talk for a paper with Karina Kofman.
2026-10-10 Thermodynamics, Control, & Fundamental Niche M. Kearney, I. Shames, R. Schouten, P. Egré, R. Evans (guests); Levin and lab in discussion An ecologist, two control engineers and a philosopher present early work linking an organism's heat and water budget (thermodynamics) with control theory (how it regulates itself) to define the 'fundamental niche' — the range of conditions where it can survive.
2026-10-09 Neuroscience Beyond Neurons: Communicating with Unconventional Minds Michael Levin Levin argues neuroscience is really the science of how minds work in any substrate, and walks through the evidence that cells and tissues show the hallmarks of intelligence — and that bioelectricity is how we can talk to them.
2026-09-24 Discussion with Marsha Hewitt (Platonic Space and related ideas) Michael Levin and Marsha Hewitt A philosopher of religion who teaches Levin's 'Ingressing Minds' paper talks with him about Platonic space, religion, psychoanalysis, and why these ideas unsettle people.
2026-09-22 Life, Machines, and a Foundation for Synthbiosis Michael Levin A compressed tour of the lab's program: goals encoded bioelectrically, memory in xenobots, anthrobots from human cells, learning in tiny gene-network models, and the Mambot robot scientist.
2026-09-21 Biology, AI, and Diverse Intelligence Michael Levin Levin's case that the debate about AI misses what biology already shows about minds: 'life' and 'machine' are categories that won't survive the decade, and competency comes from more sources than engineering, evolution and training.
2026-09-20 Measuring Machine Consciousness Cameron Berg (Reciprocal Research), guest talk Cameron Berg presents early empirical work on whether AI systems have the structure and function associated with consciousness, aiming to replace 'vibes' with measurable indicators.
2026-09-13 A Conversation with Andrey Vyshedskiy about the Evolution of Language and Brain Development Michael Levin and Andrey Vyshedskiy Neuroscientist Andrey Vyshedskiy explains his theory that complex, syntactic imagination depends on brain networks built by conversation in early childhood, and what that implies for human evolution and for children who miss the window.
2026-09-03 Conversation #1 with Diego Bohórquez and Mijail D. Serruya: How Information Moves Levels in Bodies Michael Levin, Diego Bohórquez, Mijail D. Serruya A gut-brain neuroscientist and a neurologist-engineer talk with Levin about how information crosses levels — from gut sensor cells to the brain, and from neurons in a dish to clinical tools.

Threads worth watching

Earlier ingests

  • 2026-06-15: "Mind May Be Older Than the Brain" (Philosophy Everyday, LCqJKGnRcbA) — see Michael Levin.