You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show.

Today's guest is Jeff Huckins. His new book is A Thousand Brains. A new theory of

intelligence, beautiful forward by Richard Dawkins, which he reads in the audio

version, which is nice. Jeff is the co-founder of New Menta, a neuroscience research

company. He's the founder of Redwood Neuroscience Institute and one of the

founders of the field of handheld computing. He's a member of the National Academy of Engineering and author of a book called

On Intelligence. He's also a trained neuroscientist and so his book is a nice combination of technical neuroscience, how neurons work and how they

scale up into these columns and how the columns scale up into neural networks and modules

in the brain and then how the brain scales up to a whole sense of self and so we delve

into all that that takes probably an hour just explaining all of that because he

has his particular theory of the neo-courtex is the key to higher intelligence,

and that there's no central room in our brains. Instead, he says that our perception is a consensus

which the columns reach by voting, essentially by firing or not firing, and all these synaptic connections

build up or they don't. And that within columns, indeed within the neurons,

predictions are made and depending on how successful the predictions are, the

neurons will vote for their version of events.

So then we get into that, into from there, the grandmother cell, the Jennifer Aniston cell or

whatever you want to call it.

And to what extent our perceptions are veridical,

that is do we really have an accurate understanding

of the world, or is it just for survival,

and that's very species specific.

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