On Intelligence

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:

This is a serious book about how the brain functions and why decades of AI efforts have not even begun to replicate the brain's abilities. True some great advancements have been made in specialized areas of knowledge based expert systems yet even today not even the most powerful computers with the most advanced AI software can mimic a child's simple movements or automatic brain activities.

"Behavior is a manifestation of intelligence but not the central characteristic or primary definition of being intelligent", page 29

The neocortex is a thin layer of neurons (probably 30 billion or more) that wrap around most of the old brain and is organized in layers about the thickness of six business cards.

"Those thirty billion cells are you. They contain almost all your memories, knowledge, skills, and accumulated life experience. After twenty-five years of thinking about brains, I still find this fact astounding. That a think sheet of cells sees, feels, and creates our worldview is just short of incredible. The warmth of a summer day and the dreams we have for a better world are somehow the creation of these cells. Many years after he wrote his article in Scientific American, Francis Crick wrote a book about brains called The Astonishing Hypothesis. The astonishing hypothesis was simply that the mind is the creation of the cells in the brain. There is nothing else, no magic, no special sauce, only neurons and a dance of information", page 43}

Vernon Mountcastle, a neroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore published a paper in 1978 entitled "An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function". The basic premise of this paper was that all areas and regions of the neocortex perform just one common algorithm for all information received and transmitted- whether seeing, hearing or feeling- all signals and motor controls work from this common algorithm.

All your brain knows is patterns developed from its stored view of your world. Most of your brain activity is comparing signal input with stored patterns and providing feedback which is continually corrected. For example when you walk down a stairway, your brain is constantly checking its stored model of your world to determine when you foot should touch the next step - only an inch or two will immediately tell the brain that something is not matching up with its stored model of the stair steps.

The cortex is not a binary computer as we might think but is really just a memory system for patterns. The neocortex (page 70):

1. stores sequences of patterns


2. recalls patterns auto-associatively


3. stores patterns in an invariant form


4. stores patterns in a hierarchy

What is intelligence? Here is the basic proposition made by Jeff Hawkins in this book.

"Prediction is not just one of the things your brain does. It is the primary function of the neocortex, and the foundation of intelligence. If we want to understand what intelligence is, what creativity is, how your brain works, and how to build intelligent machines, we must understand the nature of these predictions and how the cortex makes them. Even behavior is best understood as a by-product of prediction", page 89.

This book provides a plausible understanding of how the brain functions and while it is a computer in the sense that it processes information with extreme efficiency it does so by making predictions against a stored memory pattern and then making constant corrections and updates it's stored memories through the learning process of sequence modification.