A Brain Made of Light That Can Read Hidden Patterns
Imagine trying to read a letter without looking at every part of it — just by noticing how it is twisted. That is, roughly, what researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa have taught light itself to do.
On 13 October 2026, Wits announced a “light-powered brain”: a system that can recognise hidden information carried in specially shaped patterns of light, and could one day help communications systems read information faster, without first taking a detailed picture and analysing it point by point.
Letters made of light
Light can carry information in its shape, much as letters carry meaning in words. Scientists can create large sets — or alphabets — of light patterns, and those patterns could carry information in future communications systems. The hard part is reading them back quickly, especially when a pattern looks a little different after travelling from one place to another.
The Wits team, led by MSc student Hadrian Bezuidenhout and supervised by Dr Isaac Nape and Professor Andrew Forbes at the Wits Structured Light Laboratory, built a system that passes light through specially designed layers. Those layers direct the light towards detectors, and where the light lands reveals the information it carries. There is no camera taking a detailed image first, and no long computer analysis of thousands of individual points.
Counting twists without mapping every crease
The hidden feature the system reads is called topology. Dr Nape explains it with a ribbon: if you twist a ribbon, then bend and fold it into many different shapes, the number of twists stays the same. Light can carry a similar hidden feature, and the new system picks out just that feature.
“We don’t need to map every crease in our fabric of light to count the twists,” said Bezuidenhout. “Our network picks out the information that matters and helps us identify the topology quickly.”
After training on just 15 examples, the system successfully recognised 81 different light structures in the family studied, including patterns it had not encountered before. It also kept working when the researchers added noise to the detector, which matters because real communications are rarely perfect.
Why it matters
The work brings together two fields: artificial intelligence and physics. The neural-network idea — learning from examples, then recognising what matters — is built directly into how the light behaves, rather than added afterwards in a computer program.
Professor Benjamin Rosman, Director of the Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute, said the research shows what becomes possible when ideas from artificial intelligence and fundamental physics are combined. Professor Forbes said the result helps with a practical challenge for a future quantum and classical internet: creating unusual light structures is only part of the job — researchers also need practical ways to read them.
The team hopes this is only a beginning. Beyond communications, Dr Nape said the approach could help with quantum technologies, where extracting information from individual particles of light presents even greater measurement challenges. The research was published in Nature Communications.
For students, the lesson is a hopeful one: the biggest ideas often live where two subjects meet. Light is physics; learning from examples is computing; putting them together made something neither could do alone.
If your child is curious about how light, patterns and computing fit together, a science tutor can turn that curiosity into confident school science — from light and waves to data and problem-solving. Book your first lesson and compare verified science tutors, online, in person or in a group class.
Sources:
- Wits University, “Wits scientists create ‘light-powered brain’ that could transform future communications”, 13 October 2026: https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2026/2026-10/wits-scientists-create-light-powered-brain-that-could-transform-future-communications.html