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Brain Scan for a Machine That Does Not Have a Brain

TL;DR for operators Most model-governance systems still treat LLM failure like a customer-support ticket: hallucination, bias, unsafe compliance, sycophancy, escalation, add a dashboard, summon a committee, repeat until morale improves. NeuroCogMap proposes a more useful question: when the model fails, which internal systems were recruited, under-recruited, or misrouted? The paper builds a functional atlas of LLM internals by clustering sparse autoencoder features into parcels, attaching cognitive descriptions to those parcels, mapping them to capabilities, and arranging those capabilities into a four-level hierarchy: perception, representation, abstraction, and application.1 ...

July 7, 2026 · 20 min · Zelina