{"id":225724,"date":"2025-11-23T13:14:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T19:14:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/the-cost-of-thinking-reasoning-models-share-aspects-of-information-processing-with-human-brains"},"modified":"2025-11-23T13:14:25","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T19:14:25","slug":"the-cost-of-thinking-reasoning-models-share-aspects-of-information-processing-with-human-brains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/11\/the-cost-of-thinking-reasoning-models-share-aspects-of-information-processing-with-human-brains","title":{"rendered":"The cost of thinking: Reasoning models share aspects of information processing with human brains"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-cost-of-thinking-reasoning-models-share-aspects-of-information-processing-with-human-brains.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can write an essay or plan a menu almost instantly. But until recently, it was also easy to stump them. The models, which rely on language patterns to respond to users\u2019 queries, often failed at math problems and were not good at complex reasoning. Suddenly, however, they\u2019ve gotten a lot better at these things.<\/p>\n<p>A new generation of LLMs known as <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/news\/2025-11-mind-readers-large-language-encode.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">reasoning models<\/a> are being trained to solve complex problems. Like humans, they need some time to think through problems like these\u2014and remarkably, scientists at MIT\u2019s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have found that the kinds of problems that require the most processing from reasoning models are the very same problems that people need to take their time with.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, they <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2520077122\" target=\"_blank\">report<\/a> in the journal <i>PNAS<\/i>, the \u201ccost of thinking\u201d for a reasoning model is similar to the cost of thinking for a human.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT can write an essay or plan a menu almost instantly. But until recently, it was also easy to stump them. The models, which rely on language patterns to respond to users\u2019 queries, often failed at math problems and were not good at complex reasoning. Suddenly, however, they\u2019ve gotten a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-225724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=225724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/225724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=225724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=225724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=225724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}