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“Intriguing.... Insightful stuff for readers immersed in the labyrinthine world of neuroscience.”―Kirkus

"A Thousand Brains eloquently expresses the ultimate goal of thousands of scientists: to understand the mechanics of the human mind. Jeff Hawkins uses wonderfully clear and fast-moving prose to give an accessible overview of a theory of human intelligence that is likely to be very influential in the future."―Michael Hasselmo, Director, Boston University Center for Systems Neuroscience

"Jeff Hawkins’ book is that rare beast: A new theory about one of the oldest mysteries, the mystery of intelligence. The book is thoughtful and original, erudite and visionary. A must read for anyone interested in how the next breakthroughs in artificial intelligence will emerge from the recent (and not so recent) discoveries in neuroscience."―Anthony Zador, professor of neuroscience, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

"Neuroscience has been exploring the wilderness of the brain for well over a century. With A Thousand Brains, at last we have a map. Jeff Hawkins takes on questions most neuroscientists don’t even dare ask, and finds answers in a new theory that explains now only how we make sense of the world, but how we are deceived. In a world threatened by the disintegration of truth into conspiracy and delusion, everyone should read this remarkable book."―Henry Markram, Professor, ?cole Polytechnique F?d?rale de Lausanne, founder of the Human Brain Project

"Brilliant....It works the brain in a way that is nothing short of exhilarating."―Richard Dawkins

“A Thousand Brains takes us on a journey from the evolution of our brain to the extinction of our species. Along the way Hawkins beautifully describes neuroanatomy and landmark discoveries in neuroscience… Hawkins keeps the reader constantly engaged.”―New York Times Book Review

Chapter Page
Foreword
by Richard Dawkins vii
Part 1 A New Understanding of the Brain 1
1. Old Brain-New Brain 11
2. Vernon Mountcastle's Big Idea 21
3. A Model of the World in Your Head 29
4. The Brain Reveals Its Secrets 39
5. Maps in the Brain 57
6. Concepts, Language, and High-Level Thinking 69
7. The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence 91
Part 2 Machine Intelligence 113
8. Why There Is No "I" in AI 119
9. When Machines Are Conscious 135
10. The Future of Machine Intelligence 145
11. The Existential Risks of Machine Intelligence 161
Part 3 Human Intelligence 171
12. False Beliefs 173
13. The Existential Risks of Human Intelligence 185
14. Merging Brains and Machines 199
15. Estate Planning for Humanity 209
16. Genes Versus Knowledge 223
Final Thoughts 241
Suggested Readings 247
Acknowledgments 255
Illustration Credits 259
Index 261

Don’t read this book at bedtime. Not that it’s frightening. It won’t give you nightmares. But it is so exhilarating, so stimulating, it’ll turn your mind into a whirling maelstrom of excitingly provocative ideas?you’ll want to rush out and tell someone rather than go to sleep. It is a victim of this maelstrom who writes the foreword, and I expect it’ll show.

Charles Darwin was unusual among scientists in having the means to work outside universities and without government research grants. Jeff Hawkins might not relish being called the Silicon Valley equivalent of a gentleman scientist but?well, you get the parallel. Darwin’s powerful idea was too revolutionary to catch on when expressed as a brief article, and the Darwin-Wallace joint papers of 1858 were all but ignored. As Darwin himself said, the idea needed to be expressed at book length. Sure enough, it was his great book that shook Victorian foundations, a year later. Book-length treatment, too, is needed for Jeff Hawkins’s Thousand Brains Theory. And for his notion of reference frames?“The very act of thinking is a form of movement”?bull’s-eye! These two ideas are each profound enough to fill a book. But that’s not all.

T. H. Huxley famously said, on closing On the Origin of Species, “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that.” I’m not suggesting that brain scientists will necessarily say the same when they close this book. It is a book of many exciting ideas, rather than one huge idea like Darwin’s.

I suspect that not just T. H. Huxley but his three brilliant grandsons would have loved it: Andrew because he discovered how the nerve impulse works (Hodgkin and Huxley are the Watson and Crick of the nervous system); Aldous because of his visionary and poetic voyages to the mind’s furthest reaches; and Julian because he wrote this poem, extolling the brain’s capacity to construct a model of reality, a microcosm of the universe:

The world of things entered your infant mind

To populate that crystal cabinet.

Within its walls the strangest partners met,

And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.

For, once within, corporeal fact could find

A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt

Built there your little microcosm?which yet

Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.

Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:

Equator speaks with pole, and night with day;

Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars?

A million isolations burn away.

The Universe can live and work and plan,

At last made God within the mind of man.

The brain sits in darkness, apprehending the outside world only through a hailstorm of Andrew Huxley’s nerve impulses. A nerve impulse from the eye is no different from one from the ear or the big toe. It’s where they end up in the brain that sorts them out. Jeff Hawkins is not the first scientist or philosopher to suggest that the reality we perceive is a constructed reality, a model, updated and informed by bulletins streaming in from the senses. But Hawkins is, I think, the first to give eloquent space to the idea that there is not one such model but thousands, one in each of the many neatly stacked columns that constitute the brain’s cortex. There are about 150,000 of these columns and they are the stars of the first section of the book, along with what he calls “frames of reference.” Hawkins’s thesis about both of these is provocative, and it’ll be interesting to see how it is received by other brain scientists: well, I suspect. Not the least fascinating of his ideas here is that the cortical columns, in their world-modeling activities, work semi-autonomously. What “we” perceive is a kind of democratic consensus from among them.

Democracy in the brain? Consensus, and even dispute? What an amazing idea. It is a major theme of the book. We human mammals are the victims of a recurrent dispute: a tussle between the old reptilian brain, which unconsciously runs the survival machine, and the mammalian neocortex sitting in a kind of driver’s seat atop it. This new mammalian brain?the cerebral cortex?thinks. It is the seat of consciousness. It is aware of past, present, and future, and it sends instructions to the old brain, which executes them.

The old brain, schooled by natural selection over millions of years when sugar was scarce and valuable for survival, says, “Cake. Want cake. Mmmm cake. Gimme.” The new brain, schooled by books and doctors over mere tens of years when sugar was over-plentiful, says, “No, no. Not cake. Mustn’t. Please don’t eat that cake.” Old brain says, “Pain, pain, horrible pain, stop the pain immediately.” New brain says, “No, no, bear the torture, don’t betray your country by surrendering to it. Loyalty to country and comrades comes before even your own life.”

The conflict between the old reptilian and the new mammalian brain furnishes the answer to such riddles as “Why does pain have to be so damn painful?” What, after all, is pain for? Pain is a proxy for death. It is a warning to the brain, “Don’t do that again: don’t tease a snake, pick up a hot ember, jump from a great height. This time it only hurt; next time it might kill you.” But now a designing engineer might say what we need here is the equivalent of a painless flag in the brain. When the flag shoots up, don’t repeat whatever you just did. But instead of the engineer’s easy and painless flag, what we actually get is pain?often excruciating, unbearable pain. Why? What’s wrong with the sensible flag?

The answer probably lies in the disputatious nature of the brain’s decision-making processes: the tussle between old brain and new brain. It being too easy for the new brain to overrule the vote of the old brain, the painless flag system wouldn’t work. Neither would torture.

The new brain would feel free to ignore my hypothetical flag and endure any number of bee stings or sprained ankles or torturers’ thumbscrews if, for some reason, it “wanted to.” The old brain, which really “cares” about surviving to pass on the genes, might “protest” in vain. Maybe natural selection, in the interests of survival, has ensured “victory” for the old brain by making pain so damn painful that the new brain cannot overrule it. As another example, if the old brain were “aware” of the betrayal of sex’s Darwinian purpose, the act of donning a condom would be unbearably painful.

Hawkins is on the side of the majority of informed scientists and philosophers who will have no truck with dualism: there is no ghost in the machine, no spooky soul so detached from hardware that it survives the hardware’s death, no Cartesian theatre (Dan Dennett’s term) where a colour screen displays a movie of the world to a watching self. Instead, Hawkins proposes multiple models of the world, constructed microcosms, informed and adjusted by the rain of nerve impulses pouring in from the senses. By the way, Hawkins doesn’t totally rule out the long-term future possibility of escaping death by uploading your brain to a computer, but he doesn’t think it would be much fun.

Among the more important of the brain’s models are models of the body itself, coping, as they must, with how the body’s own movement changes our perspective on the world outside the prison wall of the skull. And this is relevant to the major preoccupation of the middle section of the book, the intelligence of machines. Jeff Hawkins has great respect, as do I, for those smart people, friends of his and mine, who fear the approach of superintelligent machines to supersede us, subjugate us, or even dispose of us altogether. But Hawkins doesn’t fear them, partly because the faculties that make for mastery of chess or Go are not those that can cope with the complexity of the real world. Children who can’t play chess “know how liquids spill, balls roll, and dogs bark. They know how to use pencils, markers, paper, and glue. They know how to open books and that paper can rip.” An

A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI.

For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence?

Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world-not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought.

A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word.