For all we hear of neuroscience's great advances the field has generated more questions than
answers. We know that the brain combines sensory input from all over your body into a single
perception but not how. We think brains compute in some sense but we can't say what those
computations are. We believe that the brain is organized as a hierarchy with different pieces
all working collaboratively to make a single model of the world. But we can explain neither how
those pieces are differentiated nor how they collaborate. Neuroscientist and computer engineer
Jeff Hawkins argues that it's so hard to answer questions about the brain because our basic
picture of how the brain works is wrong. In A Thousand Brains Hawkins takes a radically new
approach to the brain with stunning implications. Hawkins' proposal called the Thousand
Brains Theory of Intelligence is that your brain is organized into thousands upon thousands of
individually computing units called cortical columns. These columns all process information
from the outside world in the same way and each builds a complete model of the world. But
because every column has different connections to the rest of the body each has a unique frame
of reference. Your brain sorts out all those models by conducting a vote. The fundamental job
of the brain therefore is not to build a single thought but to manage the thousands of
individual thoughts it has every moment. With this powerful new framework Hawkins is able to
reassess some of neuroscience's most stubborn problems like why pain needs to be painful to be
useful how we can understand that our perspective of a thing changes as we move around it and
why we might be conscious but individual pieces of our body aren't. And once you understand how
the brain works it is a lot easier to make one yourself. Hawkins is above all an engineer
and A Thousand Brains outlines how a new understanding of intelligence could lead to truly
intelligent AI. Hawkins explores how we might create machines that can learn on their own why
we need not fear superintelligent systems and how human and machine intelligence may someday
merge. Combining cutting-edge theoretical neuroscience with an ambitious program for tomorrow's
digital minds A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the study of intelligence. It is a
big-think book in every sense of the word.
