🔴 "INCONGRUENT NEURONS" (Incongruent Neurons / ICN)

About 20% of your brain may anticipate ERRORS.

A groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications in January 2026
introduced a biomimetic brain model developed by a Dartmouth–MIT–Stony Brook team.
Built from scratch solely on the basis of neuronal
physiology and anatomy, without training on data from a single animal experiment, this model learned
the same task as macaque monkeys, at the same speed, with the same brain rhythm
synchronization.

More importantly: It revealed a class of neurons that no one had
noticed in decades of recordings from real brains — the same type was then
confirmed in monkey data as well.

🔴 "INCONGRUENT NEURONS" (Incongruent Neurons / ICN)

Approximately 20% of cortical neurons fire toward the WRONG category as soon as
a trial begins, even after the task has been fully learned. And they do so
~1 second BEFORE the behavior.

In other words, the error is mapped out at the neural circuit level before the behavior occurs.

🧠 WHY DOES THIS MATTER FOR PSYCHIATRY?

The same corticostriatal circuit is affected in many conditions, from OCD to substance use
and from depression to ADHD. ICNs offer a neuroscientific answer to the question,
"Why do I make mistakes even when I know better?"

➡️ These neurons may not be a flaw — they may represent the brain's capacity for flexibility.
If you learned only what was "correct," you would be paralyzed when the rules changed.

🟡 CLINICAL REFRAMING

"They do it even though they know they're harming themselves" —
not a character weakness, not a lack of willpower, not deliberate sabotage.
It may be a manifestation of the corticostriatal flexibility circuit.

From judgmental language to a neural explanation.

💻 Click to access the full summary of the article and the papers

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Alişan Burak Yaşar
Psychiatrist