On Intelligence

• Jeff Hawkins– Founder, Palm Computing: Palm Pilot– Founder, Handspring: Treo– Founder: Numenta

• Redwood Neuroscience Institute • Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience

at UCBerkley

– Published On Intelligence in 2004

One Function for All?

• Vernon Mountcastle, Johns Hopkins

• “An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Functions”, 1978– The various regions of the cortex for different

senses all look the same …– Mountcastle proposed that all cortex regions

implement the same algorithm.– Vision, hearing, sensing … all the same thing

from the perspective of neural computation

Brains vs. Computers

Brains Computers

very slow fast

highly parallel generally sequential

highly redundant generally singular

composed of layers of neurons

composed of storage and processing units

Information flows both

ways

Spatial and temporal

patterns from retinas

What you think you see.

What your eyes are actually focusing on.

Saccades and fixations

~3/second

What you think you see.

What your eyes are actually receiving.

Distortions amplify what your eyes are fixated on

Shifts in fixation do not simply shift the image

IT cells respond to specific object types in fov:i.e. a human face

V1 cells respond to specific features:i.e. a line slanted at 30degrees

When inputs don’t match predictions (at any layer), the discrepancy is quickly noticed.

Feedback signals are predictions about what we expect to happen next

Feedback signals are spread very broadly across upper layer