But if depression is truly able to disconnect this circuit, what does it mean? “One possibility,” the scientists suggested, “is that the uncoupling of this circuit could be associated with impaired ability to control and learn from social or other situations that provoke feelings of hate toward self or others. This in turn could lead to an inability to deal appropriately with feelings of hate and an increased likelihood of both uncontrolled self-loathing and withdrawal from social interactions.” This agrees with the finding that depressed individuals usually have difficulty controlling negative thoughts.

A Blog post by Maxime Labonne on Hugging Face

The news comes from a recently published paper titled "Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction." The raw material for the experiments is tens of thousands of pieces of code, written in a programming language called—I'm not making this up—Brainfuck. The researchers call this an "esoteric language chosen for its simplicity" in only allowing two mathematical functions: +1 or -1. These chunks of code were randomly mixed, combined, and "left to execute code and overwrite themselves and neighbors based on their own instructions" over millions of generations.