We are inteligent not because we can do one thing particularly well, but because we can learn to do practically anything.Jeff Hawkins, ‘A Thousand Brains’, pg. 134

Dream10x.com’s goal this year, in 2025, is to read 52 books in 52 weeks and to provide five key takeaways from each book.

Five Key Takeaways

• In June of 2022 we reviewed the Jeff Hawkins book, ‘On Intelligence’. His book, ‘A Thousand Brains’, was published in 2021, and seems to be an evolution of his work published in ‘On Intelligence’.
• One central theme of the book is the value of cortical columns in the neocortex, as originally defined by Vernon Mountcastle as discussed in his 1978 book, ‘The Mindful Brain’. Cortical columns are the fundamental building blocks of intelligence in the neocortex. Regardless of the data they process, cortical columns somehow know how to process the data even though there is very little variation/specialization of the cortical column cells in the neocortex.
• Spatial mapping is a big part of intelligent processing. Where we are in space and time is made available by cells in both the old parts of the brain and the new parts. The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex provide such location awareness in the older parts of the brain.
• Reference frames are abstractions for helping to understand how information is stored and traversed in the neocortex to provide context on thoughts. Reference frames are present everywhere in the neocortex. They are used to model everything we know. All knowledge is stored at locations relative to reference frames.
• Artifical General Intelligence can be characterized as an intelligence with the following characteristics:
  • Continous Learning
  • Learning via Movement
  • Many Models of the World (and Continuously Rebuilding these Models)

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Links

• Vernon Mountcastle
• ‘On Intelligence,’ by Jeff Hawkins
• Dream 10X Episode 77: How To Create A Mind
• Maya Numerals
• Computer Number Systems