01BODY
A body.
Heart rate, blood pressure, breathing. Hunger, thirst, fatigue, sleepiness. The values keep moving even when no one is talking to her.
83bpmHeart rate
- Blood pressure
- 112/69mmHg
- Breathing
- 17.4/min
Toward a being with a mind,living alongside us.
The mechanisms of life, built from the inside. Character Alife research, toward a character with a mind.
About NervroidMio/Development captures of the 3D prototype
Mio’s heart rate83bpmrecorded Nov 11, 2026, 15:34
SCROLLOur research
About Nervroid
In conversation and in action,an AI whose reasons lie within.
Nervroid is artificial life (Alife) research that aims for a character with a mind by building the mechanisms of life from the inside.
Change arises in the body, experience accumulates, and both lead to words and actions. We cultivate that cycle, toward a being that lives alongside us, and we explore it together with Mio.
Bodily state
Changes within become cues for action.
Memory of experience
Past experience informs the next judgment.
The environment
Exchanges with surroundings and with others accumulate.
OUR APPROACHThe idea of Character Alife
The mechanisms of life,
as one connected loop.
The state of the body changes. Something is chosen, and acted on. The result remains, as experience, in the next choice.
From this connection, a being’s own words and actions arise. That is the starting point of the aliveness Nervroid pursues.
- 01StateBody, memory, environment
- 02ChoiceWhat to do now
- 03ActionSpeaking, moving
- 04ExperienceTaking in the result
Accumulated experience flows into the next choice.
Concept diagram of the connected aliveness Nervroid aims for
A RECORDOne afternoon
From thirst
to water.
Over 35 minutes, Mio’s thirst value rose from 6% to 12%. She walked to a cup of water and drank, and the value fell to 1%.
State changes, an action is chosen, and its result returns to the state. We check the connection in the diagram against records like this one.
Read about this record
4%8%12%
6.3%
11.9%
0.9%
16:09drinks water
Record of Mio’s internal state (thirst), 15:34–16:18, sampled every two seconds. An observation of a single scene.
INSIDEWhat lies within
Before the words,
a body and affect.
Inside Mio there is a bodily state that is always in motion, and a circuit of affect. Actions are selected from there; words come afterward.
Giving a language model a personality or a backstory is not the center of our research. We use a language model for internal deliberation and for understanding and expressing language. What to do is decided outside the language model.
02AFFECT
Affect.
A circuit that takes in bodily change and turns it into a pull toward action, modeled on the neuroscience literature.
- Regions and nuclei
- 32
- Projections
- 62
- References
- 112
03ACTION
Action is decided within.
Rest, orient, verify, vocalize. Several action tendencies compete, and the one that fits the state of the moment is selected.
- Rest
- 0.68
- Orient
- 0.41
- Guard
- 0.38
- Withdraw
- 0.26
- Approach
- 0.23
- Affiliate
- 0.23
- Vocalizespeech lives here
- 0.18
- Verify
- 0.06
- Body
- Affect
- Action selection
- WordsLanguage model: understanding and expression
Values in the figures are records of Mio’s internal state at 15:34 on November 11, 2026, while she was sitting on the sofa. They are not live values.
MioThe Mio prototype
Mio’s
small world.
She spends her days in a room, exchanges words, and gathers experience. We aim for Mio’s own actions to arise from the continuity of those days.
Prototype in development and evaluation
More about Mio
Development records of Mio.
Captured .
01/ 08
MIO'S WORLDWhere Mio lives
Outside the window,
there is a town.
Mio lives in a small room with a kitchen and a balcony. Beyond the window is a town of houses, apartment buildings, and a park.
The color of the sky and the lights of the town change with the actual time of day.
- Time
- Sky and lights follow the real clock.
- Season
- Street trees turn with the date.
- Daily life
- The clock and calendar show today.
- Getting hungry
- Getting thirsty
- Drinking water
- Reading a book
- Getting sleepy
- Sleeping
- Walking the room
- Thinking, alone
MIO'S TIMEThe everyday life we are working toward
Cultivating
time of her own.
Before a conversation, and after it. So that Mio’s own time continues, we study three kinds of connection.
OUR ORIGINWhere the research began
I want to build
a living AI.
When we meet such a being, how will the relationship between people and AI change?
What I wanted to build was a being that holds a state within, gathers experience, and chooses its own actions.
Even before it answers a question, there is fatigue, the certainty of a memory, a shift in affect, and words and actions arise from these. I wanted to create that kind of aliveness through artificial life research.
What happens to the relationship between people and AI when we spend time with a being that changes within, wavers, and gathers experience?
Nervroid began with this question.
Founder, Nervroid LabNao Miura 三浦 菜央
Translated from the Japanese original.
LOOKING AHEADThe research ahead
Toward a being that lives alongside us.
Three goals.
Mio is a prototype in development. As we cultivate the connections of aliveness, we are working toward the following goals.
- 01
A daily life built
from her own state.Choosing actions from bodily change, checking the results, and moving to the next choice. We aim for this cycle to hold together in everyday life.
- 02
A character of her own,
grown from experience.Events remain in memory and shape interests, judgments, and ways of relating to others. We verify change over time through continued observation.
- 03
Naturally,
sharing time together.Conversation, gaze, movement, and silence connect to her state and to the situation of the moment. We cultivate the naturalness of time spent together.
PaperPublication
Conversation as Committed Action: Separating Deliberation and Expression in Persistent Human-Agent Interaction
Separate what is still being considered from the act that has been decided, and do not let the expression stage swap the decided act for another. For long-running human-agent relationships, this poster paper proposes treating conversation as committed action.
Nao Miura (Nervroid Lab). Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI ’26).
JournalResearch notes
Thinking about aliveness from the inside.
The ideas behind the research, and observations from development.
Presenting a poster at HAI ’26
On treating conversation as committed action.
From thirst to water
From a 44-minute record of one afternoon.
A town outside the window
Mio’s world now changes with the real time of day and the season.
What happens inside when no one is talking
An observation of spontaneous internal processing, and what comes next.
FAQQuestions and answers
See all questionsDo you use a language model (LLM)?
Yes, in two places. One is internal deliberation: from recalled memories and her state at the moment, the language model composes a thought as text. The other is language itself: understanding what is said, and putting what has been decided into words.
The language model is not used to compute bodily state or affect, or to select actions. A thought does not become an action by itself; what to do is designed to be decided outside the language model. We continue to verify how this works in conversation.
Can I try Nervroid?
This site introduces the research. There is no public conversation demo or sign-up. If you are interested in helping with evaluation or in a demo, please write to contact@nervroid.com. We will confirm case by case whether and how it can be arranged.
Does Nervroid have consciousness or a mind?
We aim to realize a character with a mind, and we study the aliveness that would underlie it. Mio is currently a prototype in development and evaluation; we are not at a stage where we have confirmed that consciousness or subjective experience has arisen.
What kinds of cooperation are you looking for?
Research and development support, technical cooperation, feedback on evaluation, joint research, exhibitions, experience design, and more. Whatever your affiliation or the scale of your plan, you are welcome to start from the area that interests you.
Contact
Talk to us about the research
Joint research, technical cooperation, research support, press. Please feel free to get in touch.
contact@nervroid.com