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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Hawkins
brain regions develop specialized functions based largely on the kind of information that flows into them during development.
Your cortex doesn’t really know or sense the world directly. The only thing the cortex knows is the pattern streaming in on the input axons.
The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all.
Inputs to the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in the present, and auto-associatively link to what normally follows next. We call this chain of memories thought, and although its path is not deterministic, we are not fully in control of it either.
Right after New York City stopped running elevated trains, people called the police in the middle of the night claiming that something woke them up. They tended to call around the time the trains used to run past their apartments.
Although the motor cortex has some special attributes, it is correct to think of it as just part of one large hierarchical memoryprediction system. It’s almost like another sense. Seeing, hearing, touching, and acting are profoundly intertwined.
The number of possible patterns that can exist on even one thousand axons is larger than the number of molecules in the universe. A region will only see a tiny fraction of these possible patterns in a lifetime.
“Doing” by thinking, the parallel unfolding of perception and motor behavior, is the essence of what is called goal-oriented behavior. Goal-oriented behavior is the holy grail of robotics. It is built into the fabric of the cortex. We can turn off our motor behavior, of course. I can think of seeing something without actually seeing it and I can think of going to my kitchen without actually doing so. But thinking of doing something is literally the start of how we do it.
I have noticed that, as I get older, I have trouble remembering new things. For example, my children remember the details of most of the theatrical plays they have seen in the last year. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I have seen so many plays in my life that rarely do I see anything truly new. New plays fit into memories of past plays, and the information just doesn’t make it to my hippocampus. For my children, each play is more novel and does reach the hippocampus. If this is true, we could say the more you know, the less you remember.
Creativity is mixing and matching patterns of everything you’ve ever experienced or come to know in your lifetime.
An expert is someone who through practice and repeated exposure can recognize patterns that are more subtle than can be recognized by a nonexpert, such as the shape of a fin on a late-fifties car or the size of a spot on a seagull’s beak.
As a baby, you learned that the light falling on a round object produces a certain shadow, and that you can assess the shape of most objects by cues from the natural world.
