Theodor Spiro

About

I’m an independent researcher (Vaika Inc., East Aurora, NY) with a biophysics background. The portfolio organizes into six directions:

1. Cellular perception — perceptome (toolkit + framework + a growing family of papers) and related work on oscillatory signaling and cancer
2. Comparative biology of neural networks — DFE, epistasis, and population-genetics tools applied to trained transformers
3. Aging research / biomarkers — cross-population replications on cardiac, transcriptomic, and EEG substrates
4. Cognition, education, experiments, social projects — instruments and studies of human cognition
5. Methods & cross-substrate work — bridges, methodological contributions, and honest negative results
6. AI-collaborative research methodology — the framework behind all of the above, applied as worked examples

I publish under one canonical name everywhere: Theodor Spiro (ORCID 0009-0004-5382-9346). Manuscripts and code are released on GitHub at github.com/mool32 and on Zenodo / arXiv.

Currently

perceptome v0.3 is the active center of the work — a Python toolkit for cellular perception analysis with a 9-PC eigenspace, capacity-floor predictor, validity scorecard, and an 8-cell cancer attractor reference. A family of papers around the framework is in preparation. In parallel: functional-differentiation DFE manuscript writeup, the epistasis Tier-2 extension on Pythia 410M / OLMo-2 1B, and the clonal-crystallization cross-substrate bridge preparing for submission.

News

Selected work

• perceptome — a Python toolkit for cellular perception analysis
  toolkit Spiro, T. · 2026 · Software release (v0.3)
  A Python toolkit treating 44 cellular signaling pathways (NF-κB, mTOR, UPR, p53, nuclear receptors, …) as a cell's perceptual repertoire. Three capabilities other tools don't directly provide: (1) a 9-PC eigenspace derived from 154 normal human cell types (Human Protein Atlas) where any cell — yours, a tumor, a drug-treated — can be located on the same map; (2) a capacity-floor predictor — given a cell type and a pathway, will it ramp under stimulus or is it already saturated; (3) a validity scorecard with three null controls (random-gene panel, housekeeping, cell cycle) that catches common perturbation artifacts before interpretation. The framework's headline empirical result is an 8-cell attractor cluster (gastric chief, pancreatic acinar, ..., gastric progenitor) that 11 cancers from 11 organ systems converge toward during transformation — independently replicated on the Sun et al. 2021 paired HCC cohort. Result of a multi-year, pre-registered research program; the tool implements only what those studies validated and deliberately excludes operations that were tested and falsified.
  DOI code
• Universal statistical signatures of evolution in artificial intelligence architectures
  arXiv Spiro, T. · 2026 · arXiv:2604.10571
  935 ablation experiments compiled from 161 publications. The DFE of architectural modifications matches biological DFEs (heavy-tailed Student's t; 68% deleterious / 19% neutral / 13% beneficial for major ablations); architectural diversification follows logistic dynamics with punctuated equilibria; 14 architectural traits were independently invented 3–5 times in parallel with biological convergences.
  arXiv DOI code
• Spectral exponents of the twelve-lead ECG reveal the anatomy of cardiac conduction disorders and a bifurcation between aging and disease
  bioRxiv Spiro, T. · 2026 · bioRxiv (submitted)
  Spectral exponent β extracted from 412,730 twelve-lead recordings across three continents (PTB-XL, Chapman-Shaoxing, CODE-15%). β is diagnostic of cardiac conduction anatomy: CLBBB vs CRBBB AUC = 0.982 (Germany), 0.982 (China), 0.979 (Brazil). Aging flattens the spectrum; disease steepens it. Honest null on independent mortality prediction (HR = 1.02, p = 0.83).
  DOI code
• Transcriptomic noise accumulates within tissue identity across human aging
  bioRxiv Spiro, T. · 2026 · bioRxiv (post-review v4)
  Three-level variance decomposition on bulk transcriptomes from 263 GTEx v8 donors plus single-cell data from Tabula Muris Senis, Calico rat caloric-restriction atlas, and a rhesus macaque cross-species atlas. Tissue identity is preserved across forty years of aging; the signature is systemic noise, not selective accumulation. Caloric restriction acts as a noise filter, not a structure restorer. Cross-species lifespan scaling (α = −1.02, R² = 0.90).
  DOI code
• Waveform asymmetry as a biomarker of neural aging: spatial degradation of oscillatory cycle shape across two independent cohorts
  Front. Aging Neurosci. Spiro, T. · 2026 · Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience (under review)
  Peak-trough asymmetry of EEG oscillations across five frequency bands in 215 (LEMON) and 608 (Dortmund Vital Study) adults, with 208-subject 5-year longitudinal follow-up. Beta-band asymmetry decreases with age (r = −0.326 LEMON, r = −0.314 Dortmund); effect size exceeds classical alpha slowing. Theta spatial entropy predicts memory independent of age.
  DOI code
• Clonal crystallization as a shared signature of bone-marrow aging and neural-network training
  cross-domain Spiro, T. · 2026 · Manuscript, in preparation
  A two-metric framework (Gini + effective N) applied jointly to mouse cell-type proportions and to Pythia-410M head-importance distributions. Pythia moves through (ΔGini, Δeff_N) by (+0.145, −45.5) over 143k steps; bone marrow on FACS and Droplet platforms moves in the same quadrant. Caloric restriction in rat bone marrow rescues 64% of the Gini drift. A specific substrate-independent signature, narrower than full DFE universality.
  code
• Functional differentiation generates universal fitness-effect distributions in neural networks
  preprint Spiro, T. · 2026 · Manuscript
  Ablation studies of 144 identity-tracked attention heads, 24 transformer layers, and 30 distributed-noise perturbations at each of 8 checkpoints (step 512 → 143,000) of Pythia 410M-deduped — 1,584 ablations. The DFE shape evolves from delta-peak-with-outliers to heavy-tailed Student's t (df ≈ 2.3, β ≈ 0.6 within biological range). 39% of eventually-critical heads emerge from noise; only 4% are born critical. L8H9 undergoes phase-transition-like specialization between steps 4k–8k.
  code
• The Oracle's Fingerprint: correlated AI forecasting errors and the limits of bias transmission
  preprint Spiro, T. · 2026 · Manuscript, in preparation
  Three studies on whether the wisdom of crowds survives consultation of a small set of LLMs. GPT-4o, Claude, and Gemini show pairwise error correlation r = 0.78 on 568 resolved binary Metaculus forecasts (Study 1). Community forecasts move in the LLM-predicted direction (r = 0.20, p = 0.007), but the shift is fully explained by rational updating toward ground truth (Study 2). Pre-ChatGPT human biases already strongly resembled the LLM pattern (r = 0.87); post-ChatGPT the resemblance weakened (r = −0.28) — LLMs inherited human biases rather than introducing novel ones (Study 3).
  code
• 21,000 attempts to think differently: a large-scale Russian adaptation of the Divergent Association Task
  manuscript Spiro, T. · 2026 · Manuscript
  Russian-language adaptation of the Divergent Association Task (Olson et al., 2021). 21,159 submissions; Cronbach's α = 0.899; split-half reliability 0.696; no measurable practice effect. Strongest predictor: semantic category diversity (r = 0.47). Theoretical ceiling 110.5 (best human attempt: 104.8). Live instrument runs at mool32.github.io/dat-ru.
  code live demo

Full publication list →

Projects organized by theme →

AI-collaborative research methodology →