David Reich

decomposition of them computationally mapped on to the neurons and they actually learned a language for how that's the case.

And then what they did is they showed a 2001st photograph to the monkey.

They recorded from its neurons and then tried to use the neurons to reassemble a photograph.

And it was a perfect reassembly of the photograph.

They had actually completely learned how the brain, this CACS brain, represents the photograph.

going through the brain representation.

So in that case, they were able to completely figure out the language of appreciation of a photograph through the biological representation of it.

And if you look at the parallel problem of the genome, how does the genome code for development and how we get to how we are today?

How do we have our capacities and so on?

To me, it sounds like at first principles, if you ask me what's a simpler problem, figuring out how to represent the natural world.

in our brain or figuring out how to code for development.

I think my cognitive bias, if you were presented ab initio this problem, would be to say it's easier to code for development than to represent the outside world in a brain.

But this group and other groups are figuring out how to do this nearly perfectly with a readout from the brain.

And we really can't read a genome and tell you how a person looks, how a person develops.

We can begin to say what terrible diseases they have, but not even predict that so well.

And so that's very depressing that we can't actually read the genome enough to actually see how that occurs.

And we actually don't even know how evolution happens.

Like, for example, does evolution happen by lots of little changes pushing in some direction?

Like, for example, if we want to move toward a different positive set point for height or for...

some cognitive capacity or propensity or something?