Intelligence is measured by the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including language, mathematics, physical properties of objects, and social situations.

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.

had cataloged turn out to be not very relevant, just accidents of history or the requirements of local geography.

The collective activity on a bundle of fibers is what is meant by pattern.

Most of the information is sitting there idly waiting for the appropriate cues to invoke it.

There is only one way to interpret your reaction to the altered door: your brain makes low-level sensory predictions about what it expects to see, hear, and feel at every given moment, and it does so in parallel. All regions of your neocortex are simultaneously trying to predict what their next experience will be.

It isn’t just that we are faster; we are actually recognizing words and phrases as entities.

A thesis of this book is that understanding cannot be measured by external behavior;

In the cortex, lower areas feed information up to higher areas by way of a certain neural pattern of connectivity, while higher areas send feedback down to lower areas using a different connection pattern.