Check out this fascinating research meeting with Numenta and guest speaker Max Bennett. Max describes this thalamocortical microcircuit theory. More detail can be found in his paper, published here: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2020.00040/full#h1
Figure 1: Our headline image is from the Cognitive Consilience: An atlas of key pathways cross-referenced to supporting literature articles. The complexity and variety of routing within the brain can be appreciated with this beautiful illustration. Note in particular the specialisation of cortical cells and the way this affects their… Read More »How to build a General Intelligence: Circuits and Pathways
We have found a fantastic resource, part of the IBM Blue Brain Project, that clearly and interactively maps out interactions between neocortical neurons. The data comes from their attempts to simulate a piece of cortex down to the level of biologically-realistic neurons. Interactive neocortex browser tool here: https://bbpnmc.epfl.ch/nmc-portal/web/guest/microcircuit The… Read More »Digital Reconstruction of Neocortical Microcircuitry (resource)
By Gideon Kowadlo and David Rawlinson In our last blog post, we discussed the repeating functional columnar structure of the neocortex, and the inconsistent terminology used to discuss it throughout the literature. As mentioned in that post, the function of the column is an important concept for understanding the function of the… Read More »A nomenclature for Cortical Columns and related concepts.
Cell-type-specific 3D reconstruction of five neighboring barrel columns in rat vibrissal cortex (credit: Marcel Oberlaender et al.) It is well established that there is a functional columnar structure repeated throughout the cortex across species (the concept received significant attention after a study by Mountcastle in 1957 [1]; see [2] and… Read More »Mini, macro, micro and hyper columns: confusing terminology
by Gideon Kowadlo and David Rawlinson Introduction One of the keys to understanding the neocortex as a whole, and the emergence of intelligence, is to understand how the cortical hierarchical levels interconnect. This includes: the physical connections, the meaning of the signals being transmitted, and possibly also the way the… Read More »Thalamocortical architecture
by Gideon Kowadlo and David Rawlinson In a previous post (section ‘Regions’), we discussed the distinction between cortical layers and levels. The literature often describes connections between cortical layers in one level to cortical layers in another level. We are not aware of a written convention for this purpose and propose one… Read More »A notation for intracortical neural connections
by David Rawlinson and Gideon Kowadlo Introduction The Memory Prediction Framework (MPF) is a general description of a class of algorithms. Numenta’s Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA) is a specific instance of the framework. Numenta’s Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) was an earlier instance of the framework. HTM and CLA adopt different… Read More »Architecture of the Memory Prediction Framework / Cortical Learning Algorithm / Hierarchical Temporal Memory
by David Rawlinson and Gideon Kowadlo The Blog This blog will be written by several people. Other contributors are welcome – send us an email to introduce yourself! The content will be a series of short articles about a set of common architectures for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Specifically,… Read More »Introduction