A multilayer perceptron is a passable model of the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for low-level motor control, but the cortex is another story. It’s missing the backward connections needed to propagate errors, for one, and yet it’s where the real learning wizardry resides. In his book On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins advocated designing algorithms closely based on the organization of the cortex, but so far none of these algorithms can compete with today’s deep networks.
