I was studying something similar in my MSc about the neurobiology of language. It's well known that reading circuits in the brain make predictions about which words come next - a sentence like "The jam on the motorway made traffic slow" doesn't elicit much activity, whereas "The jam on the motorway was sticky" does, because "motorway" makes it much more likely that "jam" was about slow traffic rather than the condiment. (There are perhaps some interesting parallels to LLMs there...) But we were looking in the visual cortex, way back before the brain is even perceiving words, and we were finding pre-activation of circuits even there depending on whether people were presented with real words (e.g. sheep) or non-words (e.g. brast).
I think there's a lot to be said for conceptualising the brain as a statistical machine - it makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms. There's a great video introduction to that idea with Karl Friston from UCL here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI
I think there's a lot to be said for conceptualising the brain as a statistical machine - it makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms. There's a great video introduction to that idea with Karl Friston from UCL here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI