On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

by Jeff Hawkins

Let’s pop the hood and look at what’s going on in your brain to perform this amazing feat. We know from experiments that if we monitor the activity of neurons in the visual input area of your cortex, called V1, the pattern of activity is different for each different view of her face. Every time the face moves or your eyes make a new fixation, the pattern of activity in V1 changes, much like the changing pattern on the retina. However, if we monitor the activity of cells in your face recognition area—a functional region that’s several steps higher than V1 in the cortical hierarchy—we find stability. That is, some set of the cells in the face recognition area remain active as long as your friend’s face is anywhere in your field of vision (or even being conjured in your mind’s eye), regardless of its size, position, orientation, scale, and expression. This stability of cell firing is an invariant representation.