A Thousand Brains
by Jeff Hawkins · first published 2021
48% recommend46% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Accessible neuroscience theory that the neocortex is built from many near-identical cortical columns, each modeling the world through reference frames; suits readers curious about intelligence, consciousness, and AI.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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- List for the lazy - A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Hamnet,…
on “Books I loved reading this year” ↗Hawkins also has a new book coming. His first book (as said in other comments) is a fantastic read. https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Brains-New-Theory-Intelligen...
on “Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing” ↗I'm glad to see Jeff Hawkins was mentioned. Much recommend A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence.
on “The brain maps out ideas and memories like spaces” ↗Highly recommend A a thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins if you’re interested in this https://numenta.com/blog/2019/01/16/the-thousand-brains-theo... He basically argues we all have 1000s of little, but interacting models of all sorts of things…
on “What Does It Mean for AI to Understand?” ↗If you find the subject interesting and would like to read more, I recommend Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, which was released earlier this year and covers a theory that a large part of your brain is made of 150,000 near-identical subsystems called "cortical columns." It's geared…
on “Myths about the brain” ↗One thing that surprised me about ‘A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence’ by Jeff Hawkins was how many different types of computer simulations currently exist for approximations and parts to your experiment’s steps.
on “What is it like to have a brain? Ways of looking at consciousness” ↗Tangentially related book recommendation: Jeff Hawkins, A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. It describes the importance of reference frames for intelligence, for locating limbs relative to the body, locating the body in space, locating objects in space (even abstract…
on “How the brain navigates cities” ↗…candidate screening startup, Plum: https://www.plum.io/blog/the-issue-with-the-interview-confir... A confirmation bias is not a conclusion, it's a skewing/filtering of how you see something. Read the book "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins. The way your brain works fundamentally is that it makes predictions and assumes that the prediction is what will happen (the book explains this better). That's why in my original comment…
on “Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews” ↗I love Society of Mind. I read it concurrently with A Thousand Brains by Hawkins. It seems like modeling the mind as a multi-agent system is a productive approach. I was also recommended Minsky's later Emotion Machine, which I'm reading now (thanks DK for the pointer!).…
on “The Society of Mind (2011)” ↗> they're often made up of several more or less independent processes I’ve recently read “ A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins and that is essentially what he argues. That our neo cortex had consists of millions of a similar structure and many of them fire up at the same time. Fascinating…
on “Ask HN: Teach me something new” ↗Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence contains all the support you could need. He has a bunch of YouTube videos if you don't want to read the book.
on “How did a woman with a missing temporal lobe become bilingual?” ↗A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins captures some of these observations, and whether the theory is correct or not, there was definitely some resonance with how I feel like my brain might work. Things like anticipating how…
on “Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active” ↗…(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1999475.A_Million_Miles_...) 2. The Third Door: The Wild Quest to Uncover How the World's Most Successful People Launched Their Careers by Alex Banyan (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36739769-the-third-door) 3. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54503521-a-thousand-brai...) There are still like 4 weeks left until 2022 ends, and am hoping to finish more books.…
on “Ask HN: Best books read in 2022” ↗…wrestle a bit with the plethora of concepts taken for granted, unless one is writing another Dictionary of Received Ideas [1]. In this aspect, you doubting you, perhaps the perspective from Jeff Hawkins' A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence is more luminating: of course you would doubt yourself because in actuality there is a you_1 who doubts you_2 and currently you_1 is overpowering you_2 in the vote of all…
on “Telling your inner critic to chill” ↗I've been slowly reading this book on cognition and neuroscience, "A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins. The answer is: Yes, yes we are basically fancy auto-complete machines. Basically, our brains are composed of lots and lots of columns of neurons that…
on “Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”” ↗