Is There a Macro Colon in Your Brain?

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If you look under a microscope, you don't see any columns. There are another type of column that you actually can see. They're like maybe 50 microns and like these skinny little threads. What happens is the nerons are sort of bunched in these little columns,. And there's a little gap an as much another nerons, and as little gap as a bunch of other neurons. But malcas sad though, there's a larger thing called, sometimes called a macro column, or just a larger column, that composes hundreds of these many columns.

Michael Shermer speaks with Jeff Hawkins, cofounder of Numenta: a neuroscience research company, about his new book A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence in which Hawkins explains how simple cells in the brain create intelligence by using maplike structures to build hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. Listen to this in-depth dialogue about the discoveries that allow 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.