A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence (Jeff Hawkins)

About this episode:

For all of neuroscience’s advances, we’ve made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence?

Michael Shermer speaks with Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta: a neuroscience research company, about his new book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence in which Hawkins explains how simple cells in the brain create intelligence by using maplike structures to build hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. Listen to this in-depth dialogue about the discoveries that allow Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.