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Neocortex Quotes

Browse 6 quotes about Neocortex.

Neocortex Quotes

“When the neocortex wants to do something, it sends a signal to the old brain, in a sense asking the old brain to do its bidding. For example, breathing is a function of the brain stem, requiring no thought or input from the neocortex. The neocortex can temporarily control breathing, as when you consciously decide to hold your breath. But if the brain stem detects that your body needs more oxygen, it will ignore the neocortex and take back control. Similarly, the neocortex might think, 'Don't eat this piece of cake. It isn't healthy.'' But if older and more primitive parts of the brain say, 'Looks good, smells good, eat it,' the cake can be hard to resist.”

“The question of how the neocortex works can now be phrased more precisely: How does the neocortex, which is composed of thousands of nearly identical cortical columns, learn a predictive model of the world through movement? This is the question my team and I set out to answer. Our belief was that if we could answer it, we could reverse engineer the neocortex. We would understand both what the neocortex did and how it did it. And ultimately, we would be able to build machines that worked the same way.”

“Reference frames in the old brain learn maps of environments. Reference frames in the what columns of the neocortex learn maps of physical objects. Reference frames in the where columns of the neocortex learn maps of the space around the body. And, finally, reference frames in the non-sensory columns of the neocortex learn maps of concepts. To be an expert in any domain requires having a good reference frame, a good map.”