AI, the Brain, and the Biology of Intelligence
The entry of artificial intelligence into mainstream life gives us a chance to think about the meaning of intelligence – human and machine – and how both will develop in the future.
While AI models can solve problems far beyond human capabilities – from image recognition to the prediction of protein folding – they can fail at seemingly simple tasks. While humans have generalized intelligence, we fail at navigating complex option spaces and quickly reach the limits of our computational power.
So what does it actually mean to be intelligent? And how does artificial intelligence compare to the biological intelligence of our own brains? The relationship between artificial and biological intelligence goes back to the beginnings of AI research, when scientists first attempted to recreate aspects of the human brain using artificial neural networks. Today, AI has evolved into something very different from its biological inspiration.
In episode 53 of the BioRevolution podcast, Andreas Horchler and Louise von Stechow explore the relationship between human and artificial intelligence, how AI and neuroscience can converge to provide a better understanding of intelligence and consciousness, and what role psychedelics might play in all this.Disclaimer: Louise von Stechow & Andreas Horchler and their guests express their personal opinions, which are founded on research on the respective topics, but do not claim to give medical, investment or even life advice in the podcast.
Learn more about the future of biotech in our podcasts and keynotes. Contact us here: scientific communication: https://science-tales.com/ Podcasts: https://www.podcon.de/ Keynotes: https://www.zukunftsinstitut.de/louise-von-stechow
Image: Mike Kononov via Unsplash
References:
- Grim P. Understanding Artificial Intelligence: Of Minds and Machines. The Great Courses (undated). https://shop.thegreatcourses.com/understanding-artificial-intelligence-of-minds-and-machines
- McCulloch WS, Pitts W. A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity (1943). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02478259
- Turing AM. Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950). https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/LIX.236.433
- McCarthy J et al. A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence (1955). https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/DartmouthProposal.pdf
- Buchanan BG. A (Very) Brief History of Artificial Intelligence (2005). https://doi.org/10.1609/aimag.v26i4.1848
- Krizhevsky A, Sutskever I, Hinton GE. ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (2012). https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436e924a68c45b-Abstract.html
- Silver D et al. Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature16961
- Vaswani A et al. Attention Is All You Need (2017). https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
- Suzuki K et al. A Deep-Dream Virtual Reality Platform for Studying Altered Perceptual Phenomenology (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2
- Zador AM. A critique of pure learning and what artificial neural networks can learn from animal brains (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11786-6
- Jumper J et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2
- Cox DJ et al. Predicting changes in substance use following psychedelic experiences: natural language processing of psychedelic session narratives (2021). https://doi.org/10.1080/00952990.2021.1910830
- Willett FR et al. A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06377-x
- Zhao Y et al. Artificial intelligence based multimodal language decoding from brain activity: A review (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainresbull.2023.110713
- Nutt D, Spriggs M, Erritzoe D. Psychedelics therapeutics: What we know, what we think, and what we need to research (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropharm.2022.109257
- Artificial intelligence is not a substitute for human intelligence (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-025-00517-y
- Mathis MW, Mathis A. Joint modelling of brain and behaviour dynamics with artificial intelligence (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-025-00996-1
- Riva G et al. AI-generated virtual psychedelics bridge digital and therapeutic frontiers in mental health research (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-025-00576-3
Comments
New comment