A Thousand Brains Quotes

“It is human nature - aka old brain - to suspect everyone wants to steal your idea, where the reality is that you are lucky if anyone cares about your idea at all.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“The list of things everyone should know is short. I would include
how the brain is composed of the new part and the older parts. I would include how the neocortex learns a model of the world, whereas the older parts of the brain generate our emotions and more primitive behaviors. I would include how the old brain can take control, causing us to act in ways we know we shouldn’t. And I would include how all of us are susceptible to false beliefs and how some beliefs are viral.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“There are two ways to think about ourselves. One is as biological organisms, products of evolution and natural selection. From this point of view, humans are defined by our genes, and the purpose of life is to replicate them. But we are now emerging from our purely biological past. We have become an intelligent species. We are the first species on Earth to know the size and age of the universe. We are the first species to know how the Earth evolved and how we came to be. We are the first species to develop tools that allow us to explore the universe and learn all its secrets. From this point of view, humans are defined by our intelligence and our knowledge, not by our genes. The choice we face as we think about the future is, should we continue to be driven by our biological past or choose instead to embrace our newly emerged intelligence?”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“Unlike species which often disappear as new ones appear, the brain evolved by adding new parts on top of the older parts.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“When the neocortex wants to do something, it sends a signal to the old brain, in a sense asking the old brain to do its bidding. For example, breathing is a function of the brain stem, requiring no thought or input from the neocortex. The neocortex can temporarily control breathing, as when you consciously decide to hold your breath. But if the brain stem detects that your body needs more oxygen, it will ignore the neocortex and take back control. Similarly, the neocortex might think, 'Don't eat this piece of cake. It isn't healthy.'' But if older and more primitive parts of the brain say, 'Looks good, smells good, eat it,' the cake can be hard to resist.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“The question of how the neocortex works can now be phrased more precisely: How does the neocortex, which is composed of thousands of nearly identical cortical columns, learn a predictive model of the world through movement?
This is the question my team and I set out to answer. Our belief was that if we could answer it, we could reverse engineer the neocortex. We would understand both what the neocortex did and how it did it. And ultimately, we would be able to build machines that worked the same way.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

“For many years, it was believed that the connections between neurons in an adult brain were fixed. Learning, it was believed, involved increasing or decreasing the strength of synapses. This is still how learning occurs in most artificial neural networks.
However, over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that in many parts of the brain, including the neocortex, new synapses form and old ones disappear. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were previously not connected. Forgetting happens when old or unused connections are removed entirely.”
― Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence