I spent years in healthcare, from nurse assistant to admissions and administration. Families kept asking me whether their loved one was still in there. I never had a good answer. Now the same question gets asked about AI, usually with worse evidence.

A rat commits to a choice. A monkey commits to a choice. An AI model produces a token. Whether those are the same kind of event is an empirical question, and it's answerable, and I'll run it live on an AI model. No cloud, no API, no trust-me slides.

Most brain-versus-AI comparisons you've seen in headlines fail the same way: the obvious method manufactures a confound that looks like a finding. I'll show you the confound, how to spot it in the wild, and what has to be pinned down in advance before a cross-system claim means anything.

You leave able to read the next "AI thinks like a brain" story and know within a minute whether it holds up.

Intermediate. 30 min preferred. Live demo runs on my own hardware; needs HDMI and nothing else, no venue wifi. Related work: poster, The Science of Consciousness 2026, San Diego, October 2026.