What's Your Big Idea?

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Avernon montcacalforthia is a new book about the history of science. In it, author David Frum explains how he came up with an unusual idea for brain structure. He says that we have 70% of our brains and they're all doing the same thing. And so if you can figure out what each region does, you can work out why everything works in such a similar way., writes Frum.

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.