Is There a Generic Generic Cell?

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We've lived this model of a nuron that goes back o probably now 80 years or something like that. There's a cell in there somewhere that only fires when they see a picture of your grandmother, i think christov co called it the genifer aniston cell. And so what you canso we call this repre representational capacity. It can represent gazilian things, because you're just picking a random set of small, sparse number cells.

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.