The common view of a nuron is actually pretty incorrect. Anoron has a cell body secty l blob. It's very small, and it has all these synapses attached to it. Only the ones that brey close to the cell body are able to work like we commonly think of the nora. And so learning involves forming new synapses on a small section of a large dendritic tree.
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.