This is a rather poor article. It focuses on the human brain, but animals show a lot of intelligence; and many of the behavioural descriptions can be found in animals too, such as certain instinct behaviour (e. g. in female birds feeding offspring and so forth). So the whole term "preconfigured" is really weird applied here. It insinuates as if this is something special or unique or awesome. Well, ants also do many individual tasks, and also group task. For instance, they can even solve puzzles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9xnhmFA7Ao

I am not saying each individual ant understands how to solve this, of course, but collectively they are able to solve a task that each individual ant could never solve on their own. Would not the term "preconfigured" apply to the ant brain too? And that is a really tiny brain.

Organoids of brains are great for experimental setup, but are they really required to understand the human brain? As far as I can see it, organoids mostly fulfil a niche for drugs, pharmacy etc... as well as development. I don't really see how organoids really fit into behaviour testing much at all. Unless you attach them to a body or something - the Frankenstein organoid.

> Organoids are particularly useful for understanding if the brain develops in response to sensory input

I don't really see it.

Also, how is that sensory input given? We have eyes, a nose etc... - how is that wired into an organoid? That whole article seems to have been written by someone who really has at best a superficial understanding; and/or promo by the lab. That's not good.

> “These intrinsically self-organized systems could serve as a basis for constructing a representation of the world around us,” Sharf said

Ok - that's also decades old research. See numerous maze experiments with pigeons and rats in particular; and to a smaller extent taxi drivers. Organoids played no role here.

> Knowing that these organoids produce the basic structure of the living brain

But actually they don't. Yes, the genome has the information, but it's not an organoid that is built - a brain is built. In a skull. Having input of other neurons and other factors. How is an organoid the same here?

> “We’re showing that there is a basis for capturing complex dynamics that likely could be signatures of pathological onsets that we could study in human tissue,” Sharf said.

See, here he is saying something that makes sense. That's the primary use case of organoids: pathology. So it is not "preconfigured with instructions", aka behaviour - but pharmay, drug testing, big money. That's not as much a catchy title though.

Research is great, mind you, but articles like this REALLY need to be checked internally for quality - including the title. Because the title:

"Evidence suggests early developing human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

does not fit the content.