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

by Jeff Hawkins

Mammals are more intelligent than reptiles because of their neocortex.

intelligence and understanding started as a memory system that fed predictions into the sensory stream. These predictions are the essence of understanding. To know something means that you can make predictions about it.

On some fixations the cell will fire strongly, on others it will fire weakly or not at all. Thus each time you make a saccade, many cells in V1 are likely to change their activity.

What is a cell? What does it mean for a cell to fire?

While humans can, under laboratory conditions, be made to recognize objects without moving their eyes, this is not the norm. Normal vision, such as you reading this book, requires constant eye movement.

In this way the world is like a song. Every object in the world is composed of a collection of smaller objects, and most objects are part of larger objects.