Choosing what to learn and deciding how to do so is a huge decision. Such choices can have significant long-term impact and we often decide to sacrifice a lot in the short-term to gain a bigger future reward. Neuroscientists are starting to unpack whether and why our brains may prioritise learning early on to yield considerable advantages long-term.

The NeuroDataShare 2023 conference, hosted at SWC last month, centred around collectively addressing the challenge of how neuroscience data can be structured to facilitate reuse.

Last week, works from three groups were published in eLife, jointly addressing the question of how the hippocampus learns to predict the future state of the animal given the current state, known as the successor representation. The three papers offer different angles from which to understand this phenomenon.

With the rise of ChatGPT, we may be feeling a step closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI), the quest to create AI that can solve any general task that a human can. But even if we could create AGI, would it ever be conscious and how would we know? We spoke with 10 leading neuroscientists, who have all given seminars at SWC, to find out their thoughts. Here are their takes.