This is a great step toward a cognitive theory of LLMs: maybe they don’t just compute tokens, but form a kind of internal workspace.
But cognition is not just representation. In brains, what matters is also control: what gets routed, what gets stored, what gets suppressed, and what gets acted on. That is where LLM analogies to brain memory still feel thin.
Relatedly, our work and others have found modularity in RNNs/LLMs that parallels modular organization in the brain. The open question is no longer whether these parallels exist, but what mechanisms actually make them useful.
@Jack_W_Lindsey @GuangyuRobert @pengrui_han
[1] Gu et. al., Sci. Adv. 2024, Representation induces modularization
[2] Yang et al. Nat. Neuro. 2019, Task representation causes compositionality
[3] preprint 2025, Multi-task load induces modularization.
[4] preprint 2026, modularization in LLM representation.