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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeff Hawkins
The brain uses this memory-based model to make continuous predictions of future events.
People who experienced brain damage effecting their memory lost the ability to reason about the future.
It played chess yet didn’t understand chess, in the same way that a calculator performs arithmetic but doesn’t understand mathematics.
The only way we can judge whether a computer is intelligent is by its output, or behavior.
Brains are made of neurons; therefore, the brain is a neural network.
My first criterion was the inclusion of time in brain function.
The second criterion was the importance of feedback.
The third criterion was that any theory or model of the brain should account for the physical architecture of the brain.
both AI and neural networks assume intelligence lies in the behavior that a program or a neural network produces after processing a given input.
The most important attribute of a computer program or a neural network is whether it gives the correct or desired output. As inspired by Alan Turing, intelligence equals behavior.
everything we think of as intelligence—perception, language, imagination, mathematics, art, music, and planning
Being human and being intelligent are separate matters. An intelligent machine need not have sexual urges, hunger, a pulse, muscles, emotions, or a humanlike body.
other brain structures, such as the brain stem, basal ganglia, and amygdala, are indeed important to the functioning of the human neocortex.
important roles also played by two other brain regions, the thalamus and the hippocampus,
Stretched flat, the human neocortical sheet is roughly the size of a large dinner napkin.
Humans are smarter because our cortex, relative to body size, covers a larger area, not because our layers are thicker or contain some special class of “smart” cells.
our genes specify how the regions of cortex are connected, which is very specific to function and species, but the cortical tissue itself is doing the same thing everywhere.
the cortex processes signals from the ear is the same as the way it processes signals from the eyes.
“this is the face recognition area, this is the math area, this is the music area,” and so on. Since we don’t know how the brain accomplishes these tasks, it is natural to assume that the brain carries out the various activities in different ways.
Consider the fact that you have a special visual area that seems to be specifically devoted to representing written letters and digits. Does this mean you were born with a language area ready to process letters and digits?
The human brain has an incredible capacity to learn and adapt to thousands of environments that didn’t exist until very recently.
Adults who are born deaf process visual information in areas that normally become auditory regions.
All this goes to show that brain regions develop specialized functions based largely on the kind of information that flows into them during development.
The organization of your cortex, like the political geography of the globe, could have turned out differently given a different set of early circumstances.
There is a single powerful algorithm implemented by every region of cortex.
If you connect regions of cortex together in a suitable hierarchy and provide a stream of input, it will learn about its environment.
see the dog, hear the dog, feel the dog—is experienced differently because each gets channeled through a different path in the cortical hierarchy.
the brain is the only part of your body that has no senses itself. A surgeon could stick a finger into your brain and you wouldn’t feel it.
All the information that enters your mind comes in as spatial and temporal patterns on the axons.
An image enters your pupil, gets inverted by your lens, hits your retina, and creates a spatial pattern. This pattern gets relayed to your brain. People tend to think that there’s a little upside-down picture of the world going into your visual areas, but that’s not how it works. There is no picture. It’s not an image anymore. Fundamentally, it is just electrical activity firing in patterns.
A song only exists over time.
If brain recognizes patterns and responds better to familiar patterns; thderefore, it's obvious that popular songs consist of four cords mostly. The cords form a familiar pattern.
Paul Bach y Rita, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, has developed a method for displaying visual patterns on the human tongue.
My brain receives a set of patterns that are consistent with patterns I have experienced in the past.
The feeling that I've experienced in US thatg the world around is consistsent with this statements.
Truly random thoughts don’t exist. Memory recall almost always follows a pathway of association.
Your memory of the alphabet is a sequence of patterns. It isn’t something stored or recalled in an instant or in an arbitrary order.
You can’t recall the song backward, just as you can’t recall it all at once.
All memories are stored in the synaptic connections between neurons.
even though we have stored so many things, we can only remember a few at any time and can only do so in a sequence of associations.
Artificial auto-associative memories do not use invariant representations and therefore they fail in some very basic ways.
the problem of understanding how your cortex forms invariant representations remains one of the biggest mysteries in all of science.
Robots and computer programs, like artificial auto-associative memories, are terrible at handling variation.
Your ability to easily recognize the song in any key indicates that your brain has stored it in this pitch-invariant form.
Memory storage, memory recall, and memory recognition occur at the level of invariant forms. There is no equivalent concept in computers.
The three properties of cortical memory discussed in this chapter (storing sequences, auto-associative recall, and invariant representations) are necessary ingredients to predict the future based on memories of the past. In the next chapter I propose that making predictions is the essence of intelligence.
Our brains use stored memories to constantly make predictions about everything we see, feel, and hear.
Prediction is so pervasive that what we “perceive”—that is, how the world appears to us—does not come solely from our senses. What we perceive is a combination of what we sense and of our brains’ memory-derived predictions.
neurons are just too slow to implement computer-style databases. It would take you twenty minutes instead of two seconds to notice the change as you go through the door.
Bayesian networks use probability theory to make predictions.
When listening to people speak, you often know what they’re going to say before they’ve finished speaking—or at least you think you know!
Intelligence is measured by the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including language, mathematics, physical properties of objects, and social situations. Your brain receives patterns from the outside world, stores them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now.
You sometimes hear people refer to the “old” brain or the “primitive” brain. Every human has these more ancient structures in the brain, just like a reptile. They regulate blood pressure, hunger, sex, emotions, and many aspects of movement.
