ideasthesia

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Ryan Collison

I write about cool science and share it here.

Cerebral organoid development—stem cells differentiating into neural structures

How to Grow a Brain: The Science of Cerebral Organoids

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 2 of 10 The recipe sounds almost absurdly simple. Take human stem cells. Put them in the right chemical bath. Wait. Within weeks, those cells will organize themselves into something that looks like a miniature brain—complete with neurons, glia, even rudimentary structures resembling cortical layers.

Neural organoid with emergent electrical activity—biological computing substrate

Brains in a Dish: The Promise and Peril of Organoid Intelligence

Series: Organoid Intelligence | Part: 1 of 11 In a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, a cluster of brain cells about the size of a grain of rice is learning to play Pong. Not a simulation. Not a neural network trained on millions of examples. Actual neurons—grown from stem cells,

Synthesis—meaning emerging from cellular coherence across all scales

Synthesis: Basal Cognition and the Deep Roots of Meaning

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 11 of 11 We began this series with a provocative claim: your cells are smarter than you think. We end it with something more radical: meaning doesn’t begin with minds. It begins with matter organizing itself against entropy. Michael Levin’s research into bioelectric fields,

Multi-scale coherence—from cellular to organismal organization

From Cells to Selves: How Biological Coherence Scales

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 10 of 11 Throughout this series, we’ve seen how cells think, how bioelectric fields encode morphology, how tissues solve problems collectively. But there’s a question we haven’t yet addressed directly: how does coherence at the cellular scale become coherence at the scale of

Bioelectric therapeutic intervention—modulating cellular coherence for healing

Bioelectric Medicine: Clinical Implications of Cellular Coherence

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 9 of 11 The conventional story of medicine is chemical. We treat disease by administering molecules that bind to receptors, block enzymes, kill pathogens. The body is a biochemical machine, and treatment means finding the right molecular key for the right molecular lock. But there’s

Planarian regeneration—bioelectric pattern restoring morphological memory

Regeneration as Coherence Repair: How Bodies Remember Their Form

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 8 of 11 Cut a planarian worm into 279 pieces. Each fragment—smaller than a grain of rice, containing perhaps a few thousand cells—will regenerate into a complete, proportionally correct organism within two weeks. Each new worm will have a proper head, a proper tail,

Cellular swarm intelligence—coordinated behavior through bioelectric entrainment

The Collective Intelligence of Cells: Swarm Cognition at the Tissue Scale

Series: Basal Cognition | Part: 7 of 11 Watch a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds flowing through the sky like liquid thought. No leader directs them. No central planner coordinates the dance. Yet the flock moves as one, responding to threats with millisecond precision, creating patterns that no individual bird