Can AI Help Wake Coma Patients? The Science of Consciousness
EP 35
·44:40

The model rediscovers known features of coma

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44:41"Okay, now give me a coma." And he was successfully able to recreate known phenotypes like on the right-hand side, we've got high-voltage delta oscillations. This is something that happens in coma, like the the slow sort of oscillations that are super high voltage. We've got burst suppression that's on the bottom bottom side. You got these big bursts and then and then just seconds of inactivity. Again, something that's there in coma patients. What's cool is there's no explicit programming of prior neuroanatomical knowledge on what is the difference between a coma versus a normal brain, okay? Just the genetic algorithm and that detector that I had of coma versus conscious, yes.

45:23Just that and the genetic algorithm has now independently discovered some of the core tenets of that mesocircuit hypothesis, right? What did the mesocircuit hypothesis say? It said that if if I weaken cortical drive coming in from the cortex, that's going to cause a bunch of random crap. That's what the that's what my model is doing. So, as a first pass, it's already kind of on the right track. You can smell it in the water, right? It like there's I'm on the right track because right the normal stuff that I kind of know about the mesocircuit that I hadn't baked in explicitly, it's already figuring that out. It is in it it is being it is able to

46:03into it >> Mhm. uh what we've already done over this last 5 600 years that we talked about >> um out of the box without This is sort of what people say about benchmarks and AI models. It's like, "Well, if you train it on the benchmarks, then it's going to do good on the benchmarks." >> And so the point here is it's not the the answers to the test were not provided as a part of training. And so it's getting answers that are not tainted by sort of giving them the cheat sheet beforehand. >> yeah. It's just looking at how do I make a coma? And already it's recreating parts of the mesocircuit hypothesis that we know are probably true. >> Right. Okay. Right. >> So, that's already impressive. The next

46:44part is the impressive part, which is what is the new stuff? I just want to

From Can AI Help Wake Coma Patients? The Science of Consciousness

A deep dive into how an AI model used real brain data to map coma circuits, predict new mechanisms of unconsciousness, and point to a possible target for restoring wakefulness.