Hawkins, Jeff. 2021. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Andrey Vyshedskiy

doi:10.26613/esic.6.1.282

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Hawkins, Jeff. 2021. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

Andrey Vyshedskiy
Andrey Vyshedskiy

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Published/Copyright: April 12, 2022

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From the journal Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture Volume 6 Issue 1

ESIC 2022DOI: 10.26613/esic/6.1.282Hawkins, Jeff. 2021. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of IntelligenceNew York: Basic Books. xiv, 288 pages, 8 b/w illustrations. Hardcover $30; eBook $17.99; Audiobook $25.98.Andrey VyshedskiyDo you want to learn how objects are encoded in the neocortex? Read Jeff Hawkins. I have been repeating this mantra to my students for over a decade. Hawkins has advanced well beyond his peers in understanding the fundamental rules of object encoding in the neocortex. I teach my students that our physical world consists of stable, unified, and meaningful objects—mammals, birds, insects, tables, chairs, and so on—that move in predictable ways. Similarly when we close our eyes and imagine a scene, that mental image is also populated by stable and unified objects. Objects, therefore, constitute the functional units of perception. In the neocortex, objects are encoded by neuronal ensembles (aka neuronal assemblies, cliques, cognits, and engrams). These object-encoding neuronal ensembles (objectNEs) are, therefore, fundamental units of perception in the neocortex. Understanding their physical and temporal properties creates the foundation for the understanding of higher cognitive functions such as language and imagination.Visual objectNEs form when light reflected from physical objects activates neurons to fire in synchrony. The neuronal ensemble binding mechanism, based on the Hebbian principle “neurons that fire together, wire together,” came to be known as the Binding-by-Synchrony hypothesis (Singer and Gray 1995; Singer 2007). When one recalls any object, the objectNE acti-vates into synchronous resonant activity that results in conscious perception of the object (Quiroga et al. 2008).Neurons of an objectNE are distributed over the neocortex. Consider three objectNEs encoding your mother, your car, and your favorite drinking cup. When you recall your mother, the complete animated model of your mother can be visualized in your mind’s eye thanks to firing of the neurons in the inferior temporal lobe encoding her face, neurons in V4 encoding the color of her skin, eyes and hair, neurons in V5 that encode her gait, and neurons in the Wernicke’s area that encode her voice. Similarly, when you recall your car, the synchro-nous activation of the car’s objectNE leads to conscious perception of the complete car: its color, shape, sounds, and movement. A stroke in the color-encoding neurons in V4 in both hemi-spheres will result in loss of color across all neuronal ensembles: the recalled mental images of the mother, the car, and the cup will be black-and-white. A stroke in the motion-encoding neurons in V5 in both hemispheres will result in loss of motion perception across all neuronal ensembles: one will not be able to recall one’s mother’s gait or the movement of one’s car. A stroke in the face- and shape-encoding inferior temporal lobe in both hemispheres will result in visual agnosia—the loss of perception of shapes. Patients with visual agnosia cannot see stable unified objects in their mind’s eye. Some patients with visual agnosia cannot tell a square from a triangle, as they only perceive a number of disjointed lines.The specifics of objectNE internal organiza-tion are still mainly unknown, but, through a series of groundbreaking modeling works, Hawkins was able to describe a number of constraints. Each object is encoded by thousands to millions of neurons, but neurons of an

Published Online: 2022-04-12

Published in Print: 2022-04-01

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