The brain sits in darkness, apprehending the outside world only through a hailstorm of Andrew Huxley’s nerve impulses. A nerve impulse from the eye is no different from one from the ear or the big toe. It’s where they end up in the brain that sorts them out. Jeff Hawkins is not the first scientist or philosopher to suggest that the reality we perceive is a constructed reality, a model, updated and informed by bulletins streaming in from the senses. But Hawkins is, I think, the first to give eloquent space to the idea that there is not one such model but thousands, one in each of the many
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