What is special about the wrinkly outer layer of the brain, the cortex?

And what does this have to do with the way that you come to explore and understand the world?

And by the way, why do you see a whole image when you open your eyes,

even though each part of your visual cortex has access to only a tiny bit of the image?

And for that matter, the brain is divided into different areas for sight and sound and touch and so on.

And so why, when you're petting a cat, why does the cat seem unified?

Why doesn't the sight of the cat seem separate from the purring and the feel of the fur?

Can we build a new model of how the brain works?

And in what ways is what the brain doing something very different than what's happening in current AI.

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford.

And in these episodes, we sail deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about a new model of the brain developed by my friend and colleague Jeff Hawkins,

and we'll get into an interview with him shortly.

But let me preface by saying that for centuries, people have stared at the brain and tried to figure out how this thing works.

Because when you stare at it, it's just a huge lump of cells.

You can see that there's a wrinkled layer on the outside,

and when people dissect that they can see that that part is about three millimeters thick,

and it looks a little different. It looks grayer, and so that part is called the gray matter. And we call this the cortex, which means bark, like tree bark. And the stuff below that thin layer is called white matter. And it looks white because the tiny data cables coming off the cells, the axons. These are wrapped in a little sheath called myelin, which makes it look white.

Okay, now, what you immediately notice by looking at brains across different mammals is that all

the stuff you find under the cortex, all the subcortical stuff, looks essentially the same.

Horses and elephants and mice, they all have the same architecture

...