The Coffee Cup

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A sentence is a composite it's is a composite object, right? It's built of letters. The letters form a syllables. And we know that structure. I can decite a poem that i know, i'll know all that stuff. So you see those, like a paragraph of a couple of sentences in which, i don't know, maybe a third of the letters are taken out, and you can still read it. We're just constantly doing this filling and the missing holes, right?

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.