How many patterns can the neocortex store? We need to factor in the phenomenon of redundancy. The face of a loved one, for example, is not stored once but on the order of thousands of times. Some of these repetitions are largely the same image of the face, whereas most show different perspectives of it, different lighting, different expressions, and so on. None of these repeated patterns are stored as images per se (that is, as two-dimensional arrays of pixels). Rather, they are stored as lists of features where the constituent elements of a pattern are themselves patterns. We’ll describe
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