On Intelligence

The second criterion was the importance of feedback.

Science is itself an exercise in prediction. We advance our knowledge of the world through a process of hypothesis and testing.

Scientific frameworks are often difficult to discover, not because they are complex, but because intuitive but incorrect assumptions keep us from seeing the correct answer.

The inputs to the brain are like this, but the fibers are called axons, and they carry neural signals called “action potentials” or “spikes,” which are partly chemical and partly electrical.

Rather, the job of any cortical region is to find out how its inputs are related, to memorize the sequence of correlations between them, and to use this memory to predict how the inputs will behave in the future.

The memory must store the important relationships in the song, not the actual notes. In this case, the important relationships are the relative pitch of the notes,

Our brains are always looking at patterns and making analogies. If correct correlations cannot be found, the brain is more than happy to accept false ones. Pseudoscience, bigotry, faith, and intolerance are often rooted in false analogy.

He concludes that there is a common function, a common algorithm, that is performed by all the cortical regions.

When you think about the world, you are recalling sequences of patterns that correspond to the way the objects in the world are and how they behave, not how they appear through any particular sense at any point in time.