🧠 **文献梳理与知识整合**：作者列出了几项具体的文献综述任务，例如“先天嗅觉神经解剖学”的更详尽的文献回顾，以及关于与社会行为相关的“转向子系统”细胞群（如下丘脑、BNST等）的文献综述。这些任务旨在帮助整理和合成现有研究，填补知识空白，为后续研究提供基础。

🔢 **数学与理论探索**：研究清单中包含与遗传力相关的两个小型自洽数学问题，以及“符号接地问题”的文献回顾和理论构建。这部分任务侧重于运用数学工具和理论思维来解决神经科学中的抽象问题，特别是将行为与外部条件联系起来的机制。

🔬 **神经机制的细致探究**：文章提出了更具挑战性的研究方向，例如“逆向工程顶盖（superior colliculus）”，旨在详细阐明其结构和功能，特别是其在检测特定刺激（如蛇和蜘蛛）中的作用。此外，还鼓励将现有人类社交本能框架扩展到解释其他社会行为，如愤怒和焦虑的神经回路。

💡 **人格与行为模式的解释**：作者希望能够解释其他人格障碍（如强迫型人格障碍），并将其与现有的关于人类社交本能的理论框架相协调。这涉及到整合庞杂的人格变异数据和理论，与对人类先天社交驱动力机制的理解，是一项极具挑战但可能富有成效的工作。

📊 **大数据分析与跨物种比较**：文章建议利用大型神经科学数据集（如BICCN细胞图谱）进行探索性分析，寻找与社会性相关的差异，例如与催产素相关的神经元，或在育儿、攻击性、孤独感等研究中识别出的细胞。这需要利用计算工具和生物信息学方法，从海量数据中提取有价值的见解。

Published on October 6, 2025 9:05 PM GMT

(Target audience: People who are already quite familiar with my research.)

Sometimes people ask me for non-obvious, hobby-compatible, ways that they can help me do my AGI-safety-targeted neuroscience research.

(“Obvious” things include reading what I write and giving feedback; non-hobby-compatible things include going into connectomics or laboratory neuroscience, etc.)

When that happens, I appreciate the thought! 🙏 So here are a bunch of neuroscience items on my to-do list, that are sufficiently self-contained to describe, and that I’m unlikely to get around to doing anytime soon. (In fact, I’ve mostly taken a break from neuroscience for the past 10 months and counting, as planned.) If someone wants to try their hand at any of these, have at it, and good luck!

I really don’t expect anything to come of posting this,^[1] but what the hell, worth a shot.

(I also have lots of to-do list items that are about AGI safety but not really neuroscience. These tend to be very messy and open-ended, not self-contained, and hard to describe. So I’m leaving them out of this post, with one exception (§3.1).)

1. Relatively straightforward problems

1.1 Better lit review on innate smell neuroanatomy

This is related to my post “I’m confused about innate smell neuroanatomy” (2023). After publishing that post and getting feedback, I wound up sufficiently non-confused that I felt OK dropping the matter and moving on to other things. But I’m still mildly confused about innate smell neuroanatomy in various ways. It would be nice if there were a lit review on this topic that was less half-assed than mine. For example, in the post, I talk about finding a certain paper (“Russo 2018”) to be confusingly worded, and apparently inconsistent with the rest of the literature. Someone could just reach out to the authors or other SMEs and probably sort it out.

1.2 Two little self-contained math problems related to heritability

1, 2

1.3 Lit reviews on “Steering Subsystem” cell groups related to social behaviors

(The relevant parts of the “Steering Subsystem” here are mainly the hypothalamus, BNST, and to a lesser extent various brainstem and pallidal areas, I think.)

Such lit reviews already exist—e.g. Mei et al. 2023—but there’s always room for more scrutiny and study and synthesis.

2. Hard problems

2.1 More neuroscience “symbol grounding problems” lit-reviews & theorizing

According to my theories of the brain, every innate behavior in animals has a corresponding “symbol grounding problem” sorting out how that behavior winds up associated with the right external conditions or situations (see here & here). In my work, I’ve mostly focused on symbol grounding for human social instincts, since it’s most directly AI-alignment-relevant, but it would be interesting and informative to learn about others. For example:

The symbol grounding problem for filial imprintingThe symbol grounding problem for birds building nestsThe symbol grounding problem for wolf pack hunting (and relatedly, border collies herding sheep)The symbol grounding problem for songbirds “learning from culture” how their song is supposed to sound (see e.g. here, here)Probably many others.

I have some half-assed speculations about filial imprinting here. Filial imprinting definitely has a bunch of existing literature, which I mostly haven’t looked into. For the other ones, I basically haven’t looked into them at all.

In general, the easy part is reading papers, and the hard part is coming up with plausible nuts-and-bolts hypotheses.

2.2 Work towards reverse-engineering the superior colliculus

For example, I sketch out a specific algorithm near the bottom of my post “Woods’ new preprint on object permanence” (2024), and suggest that the superior colliculus runs this algorithm (among other roles). This hypothesis could be compared with the massive experimental literature on superior colliculus structure and function, and refined or replaced.

As another example, if I’m correct that the superior colliculus^[2] detects slithering snakes and skittering spiders, exactly where in the superior colliculus does that happen, and how? It’s not a deep mystery—it seems like the kind of thing that the superior colliculus ought to be able to do—but pinning down the detailed pathways and anatomy etc. would be valuable.

2.3 Extend my human social instincts framework to explain other social behaviors

For example, write down a circuit that plausibly captures human anger. Why is it so satisfying to find someone to blame? How does anger work? If Ahmed is angry at Bob, Ahmed will generally feel very strongly that Bob should be aware that Ahmed is angry at him—this fact seems like a hint about what’s going on.

Anxiety is probably not a “social behavior” per se, but I’m interested in that one too, see my brief discussion in §6 here.

2.4 Explain the other personality disorders

I feel like I have nice elegant frameworks for understanding NPD, ASPD, and BPD. What about OCPD? What about all the other ones? (DSM lists 6 more personality disorders: “paranoid”, “schizoid”, “schizotypal”, “histrionic”, “voidant”, “dependent”.) Warning that this might be a dead-end, because these diagnoses might not be “cutting reality at the joints”. For example, I think the ASPD diagnosis is actually applied in practice to two quite different groups of people. (Possibly related to a couple of these: my ideas about schizophrenia—1,2.)

2.5 Go fishing around big neuroscience datasets for something useful

For example, Tadross et al. 2025 set up an open-source pipeline for comparing hypothalamus cells between humans and mice. Then they apply that general-purpose tool to analyze mouse-human differences pertinent to obesity. It might be cool to reproduce the pipeline, but instead hone in on differences pertinent to sociality, e.g. neurons that produce or detect oxytocin, or cells that have been identified in studies of parenting or aggression or loneliness or whatever.

There’s also the “BICCN cell atlas”, and probably many other resources that I don’t know about. Not sure what there is to be found here.

3. Extremely hard problems

3.1 Exactly what kinds of sandbox simulation tests would be possible and helpful for brain-like AGI? (And when we have an answer, can somebody start building them right now?)

This one is not really neuroscience, but very important. I feel pretty blocked by the idea that one presumably needs to have a plan for AGI alignment before thinking about how to test and validate that plan. But I dunno, maybe there are things to do right now? See some of my discussion here & here.

As for actually building secure test environments and such, that might be a big project. A few people have toyed with the idea of starting such projects, but to my knowledge nobody is actually doing so right now.^[3]

3.2 Reconcile the literature on human personality variation with my ideas on how human social instincts work

Basically, I think human personality variation largely comes down to innate social drives and reactions having different strengths in different people. Now, the literature on human personality variation is a mountain of disparate data, contradictory theories, and decades-old controversies; meanwhile, my ideas on how human innate social drives work are somewhat vague and incomplete. So using each of these to help “solve” the other would be a hell of a project.

It sounds staggeringly arrogant for me to say it, but I think I might have a shot at success! Or at least, it would sure be fun to try. But I have more urgent priorities, and am very unlikely to even start thinking about this before, I dunno, summer 2026, if ever.

1. ^{^}

   As the saying goes, “the first and foremost thing which any ordinary person does is nothing”. More specifically, it’s not that nobody has the initiative and ability to tackle one of these problems, but rather that the people who do have that kind of initiative and ability have also probably already come up with their own things that they want to work on.

2. ^{^}

    Or maybe the neighboring parabigeminal nucleus or whatever.

3. ^{^}

    I have vague recollections that up to three AI safety groups at least toyed with the idea of doing things in this vicinity, but I think none of them wound up following through. I think one of them involved Andrew Critch, the second involved Jacob Cannell, and the third was never publicly announced so I won’t share, but the person seems to have moved on to other things. I might be misremembering though.