The linear-nonlinear-Poisson (LNP) cascade model is a standard model of neuron responses. Louis Shao has recently shown that an artificial neural net consisting of LNP neurons can simulate any Boltzmann machine and perform “a semi-stochastic Bayesian inference algorithm lying between Gibbs sampling and variational inference.” In his paper he notes that the “properties of visual area V2 are found to be comparable to those on the sparse autoencoder networks [3]; the sparse coding learning algorithm [4] is originated directly from neuroscience observations; also psychological phenomenon such as end-stopping is observed in sparse coding experiments [5].”