A Thousand Brains

Don’t read this book at bedtime. (Location 57)

Not the least fascinating of his ideas here is that the cortical columns, in their world-modeling activities, work semi-autonomously. What “we” perceive is a kind of democratic consensus from among them. (Location 85)

Intelligence is intimately tied to the brain’s model of the world; therefore, to understand how the brain creates intelligence, we have to figure out how the brain, made of simple cells, learns a model of the world and everything in it. Our 2016 discovery explains how the brain learns this model. We deduced that the neocortex stores everything we know, all our knowledge, using something called reference frames. I will explain this more fully later, but for now, consider a paper map as an analogy. A map is a type of model: a map of a town is a model of the town, and the grid lines, such as lines of latitude and longitude, are a type of reference frame. (Location 199)

In the third part of the book, I look at the human condition from the perspective of the brain and intelligence. The brain’s model of the world includes a model of our self. This leads to the strange truth that what you and I perceive, moment to moment, is a simulation of the world, not the real world. (Location 222)

Note: So close to the truth there is no real world