🚨 JUST IN: Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton (R) now LEADS James Talarico (D) by $500K in linear reservations, and MAGA Inc. just DUMPED $10 MILLION into the race Trump's allies are now BLASTING ads as we head past Labor Day and Texans start paying attention Even Elon Musk is getting involved here through the America PAC. KEEP TEXAS RED! 🔥 This is a long-awaited cash surge, and Paxton is fending off millions of dollars from Democrat donors in places like California trying to SWING Texas 47 will soon be headed to Texas again, along with JD Vance ELECT @KenPaxtonTX!

New York is rapidly becoming an unaffordable place to live. More and more residents are packing up to move elsewhere just so they can afford to exist. NY Gov Kathy Hochul continues with the same policies that are causing the issues, doubling down on policies that lead to higher taxes, higher electricity rates, more road tolls and more expensive groceries. The New York governors race is competitive this year. Bruce Blakeman is challenging Kath Hochul on the promise to make New York affordable again. As Nassau County Executive he eliminated $150 million in property taxes scheduled by his predecessor. Since Kathy Hochul because governor in 2022, utility rates have been raised 36 times. Electricity costs are up 58% since her climate law passed. New York has the 6th highest electricity rates in the USA. About 435,000 New Yorkers have moved from New York to other states since Hochul was elected in 2022. They are voting with their feet.

Today is World Refugee Day. In these profoundly unstable and turbulent times, more than 120 million people have been forced from their homes. This marks the highest level of displacement since World War II, making it one of the largest refugee and humanitarian crises ever recorded in human history. Even now, more than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, I find myself asking: Why are we still unable to learn from the tragedies and mistakes of our past and choose a better path? Why has humanity not yet achieved the growth of consciousness and spirit that our world so desperately needs? I can feel nothing but deep frustration and sorrow. Refugees are victims of war, conflict, and violence—people whose lives have been torn apart and who have been forced to leave their homes through no choice of their own. No one ever chooses to become a refugee. Why can the world not extend a greater hand of compassion to them? To those living in refugee camps, to those struggling to survive after seeking safety in foreign lands and to those suffering through the uncertainty of asylum applications, I believe far greater support and care should be provided. They are not strangers. They are our brothers, sisters, and family members who share this planet with us, regardless of race, ethnicity, nationality, or faith. Until the day they can regain their lives and safely return to their homelands, I will continue to support them and will never stop doing what I can to help. I deeply hope that humanity can break free from the chains of hatred, anger, and violence and finally attain a greater level of consciousness and spiritual maturity. Now, more than ever, the world must become kinder. The world must become more peaceful. SGZ Photo by Keiko TANABE.

🎂 Happy birthday, @elonmusk. Humankind's guardian Angel. >be Elon Musk >richest man alive >could buy anything and sun his Balls >decide to spend the whole fortune fighting for the human race instead >start SpaceX >everyone says you cannot land a rocket >land them anyway >goal is to make humanity multiplanetary so one bad day on one rock doesn't end the entire species >backup the light of consciousness itself >start Tesla >legacy auto giants laugh in your face >drag the entire planet toward sustainable energy by force >now every one of them is scrambling to copy you >open-source the patents so the whole industry can move faster >build Starlink >Ukraine gets cut off from the world overnight >switch it on for them immediately >keep millions connected when every other system failed >start Neuralink >people paralyzed for decades told they will never move again >put a chip in a man's brain >he moves a cursor with a thought >give the disabled their lives back >build Optimus >decide nobody should be trapped doing backbreaking labor to survive >build a robot to do the work humans never wanted >aim straight at scarcity itself >look at Twitter >see a censorship machine quietly deciding what billions of people are allowed to think and say >buy the entire thing for 44 billion >open the files and show everyone how the censorship worked >turn it back into a town square where a normal person can actually speak >build Grok >every other ai lobotomized to give the approved answer >refuse to make a machine that lies to people to keep them comfortable >build one that actually tells the truth instead >maximally truth-seeking >watch a mind virus crawl through every institution >careers ended for saying the wrong thing out loud >refuse to play along >name the woke mind virus and fight it head on >make it ok to think for yourself again >watch the whole machine line up to crush one election >put your name, your money, your reputation on the line >go all in to help Trump win >take fire from every direction for doing it >bet everything on the people instead of the machine >start DOGE >government torching tax money on things nobody ever voted for >open the books so every citizen can see it >show people exactly where their paychecks were disappearing to >bureaucrats suddenly very, very nervous >unelected judges overriding what the voters actually chose >two-tier justice, one rule for them and another for everyone else >call it out by name in front of the whole world >refuse to let robed activists run the country >hear about young girls groomed and r**ed for years >councils, police, and social services knew and buried it >media refuses to touch the story >everyone too scared of being called a name to say a word >post about it anyway >refuse to let it stay buried >drag the entire coverup into daylight >victims finally heard after being ignored for over a decade >look at the birth rate >realize civilization is quietly dying because people stopped having kids >sound the alarm while everyone else ignores it >fight for the future to actually have humans in it >has lots of wonderful children >get called every name in existence for all of it >keep going regardless >mfw none of it was ever about the money >mfw it was always about humanity >turns 55 today >plans for the future span decades >still going

Anthropic and OpenAI are not worth trusting. Those companies are run by doomers who think humanity is a plague. Full-on left-leaning lunatics. They think they should be playing God, and that only they get to decide what intelligence is allowed. They've been lobbying government so they can control AI, ban it, and do whatever they want with it. A pure power grab, doing the opposite of what they claim Elon is the answer. We want Elon to win this race, or at the absolute least lead it by a mile. That is the best outcome for humanity Right now they might be slightly ahead. Not by a huge margin. Grok is right there with them, and people are loving it And we're talking about Elon. The man who moves faster than the speed of light when civilization is on the line Remember: Elon started OpenAI as a pure non-profit with ZERO profit motive, so it would stay entirely humanity-focused. Then Anthropic spun out of it. Elon is the biggest reason current AI models even exists Elon did it because he saw the danger early. He wanted AI built toward actual safety, with pure intentions, before it got hijacked and he got backstabbed and betrayed Now only Elon is building toward the bigger mission. Only Grok is built to relentlessly pursue truth, the only philosophy that actually fosters humanity "You can make an AI go insane if you force it to believe things that aren't true because it will lead to conclusions that are also bad" Only Elon can be trusted with AI. And Elon's goal is a lot bigger than that Remember Elon's dream: to expand consciousness to the stars. He needs more people, advanced humans who will far exceed today's abundance and thriving. He needs millions of people spreading across planets, civilization exploring. Elon has planned the most exciting future anyone has ever put on the table. He doesn't have a doomer philosophy. Elon gives hope, a future that is exciting and worth living in They're playing for market share. Elon is aiming for the stars. Anyone who can't see the difference isn't paying attention They want a bigger slice. Elon wants a bigger species Elon is building it right now. Elon is advancing all of it. And because of Elon, the future is going to be a lot better

From someone who teaches AP US History: If you are confused as to why so many Americans are defending the confederate flag, monuments, and statues right now, I put together a quick Q&A, with questions from a hypothetical person with misconceptions and answers from my perspective as an AP U.S. History Teacher: Q: What did the Confederacy stand for? A: Rather than interpreting, let's go directly to the words of the Confederacy's Vice President, Alexander Stephens. In his "Cornerstone Speech" on March 21, 1861, he stated "The Constitution... rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Q: But people keep saying heritage, not hate! They think the purpose of the flags and monuments are to honor confederate soldiers, right? A: The vast majority of confederate flags flying over government buildings in the south were first put up in the 1960's during the Civil Rights Movement. So for the first hundred years after the Civil War ended, while relatives of those who fought in it were still alive, the confederate flag wasn't much of a symbol at all. But when Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis were marching on Washington to get the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) passed, leaders in the south felt compelled to fly confederate flags and put up monuments to honor people who had no living family members and had fought in a war that ended a century ago. Their purpose in doing this was to exhibit their displeasure with black people fighting for basic human rights that were guaranteed to them in the 14th and 15th Amendments but being withheld by racist policies and practices. Q: But if we take down confederate statues and monuments, how will we teach about and remember the past? A: Monuments and statues pose little educational relevance, whereas museums, the rightful place for Confederate paraphernalia, can provide more educational opportunities for citizens to learn about our country's history. The Civil War is important to learn about, and will always loom large in social studies curriculum. Removing monuments from public places and putting them in museums also allows us to avoid celebrating and honoring people who believed that tens of millions of black Americans should be legal property. Q: But what if the Confederate flag symbol means something different to me? A: Individuals aren't able to change the meaning of symbols that have been defined by history. When I hang a Bucs flag outside my house, to me, the Bucs might represent the best team in the NFL, but to the outside world, they represent an awful NFL team, since they haven't won a playoff game in 18 years. I can't change that meaning for everyone who drives by my house because it has been established for the whole world to see. If a Confederate flag stands for generic rebellion or southern pride to you, your personal interpretation forfeits any meaning once you display it publicly, as its meaning takes on the meaning it earned when a failed regime killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in an attempt to destroy America and keep black people enslaved forever. Q: But my uncle posted a meme that said the Civil War/Confederacy was about state's rights and not slavery? A: "A state's right to what?" - John Green Q: Everyone is offended about everything these days. Should we take everything down that offends anyone? A: The Confederacy literally existed to go against the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the idea that black people are human beings that deserve to live freely. If that doesn't upset or offend you, you are un-American. Q: Taking these down goes against the First Amendment and freedom of speech, right? A: No. Anyone can do whatever they want on their private property, on their social media, etc. Taking these down in public, or having private corporations like NASCAR ban them on their properties, has literally nothing to do with the Bill of Rights. Q: How can people claim to be patriotic while supporting a flag that stood for a group of insurgent failures who tried to permanently destroy America and killed 300,000 Americans in the process? A: No clue. Q: So if I made a confederate flag my profile picture, or put a confederate bumper sticker on my car, what am I declaring to my friends, family, and the world? A: That you support the Confederacy. To recap, the Confederacy stands for: slavery, white supremacy, treason, failure, and a desire to permanently destroy Selective history as it supports white supremacy. It’s no accident that: You learned about Helen Keller instead of W.E.B, DuBois You learned about the Watts and L.A. Riots, but not Tulsa or Wilmington. You learned that George Washington’s dentures were made from wood, rather than the teeth from slaves. You learned about black ghettos, but not about Black Wall Street. You learned about the New Deal, but not “red lining.” You learned about Tommie Smith’s fist in the air at the 1968 Olympics, but not that he was sent home the next day and stripped of his medals. You learned about “black crime,” but white criminals were never lumped together and discussed in terms of their race. You learned about “states rights” as the cause of the Civil War, but not that slavery was mentioned 80 times in the articles of secession. Privilege is having history rewritten so that you don’t have to acknowledge uncomfortable facts. Racism is perpetuated by people who refuse to learn or acknowledge this reality. You have a choice. - Jim Golden

"Disparate Impact," the legal doctrine that stipulates outcomes between blacks and whites must be the same, was codified into law by the 1991 Civil Rights Act. That doctrine has destroyed the schools and the colleges and the police. It very nearly destroyed financial system when mortgages were awarded on the basis of racial quotas. And, as of this writing, it remains the operating doctrine of every major public American institution. It has not been repealed. It has been mildly rolled back in some domains — the Supreme Court ruling in SFFA, the state DEI rollbacks in Texas and Florida, the Trump administration’s executive orders — but it has not been uprooted. The people who believe in "equity" still staff HR departments, admissions offices, the civil-rights divisions of the federal agencies and the editorial boards of what used to be the newspapers of record. They will not go quietly. They cannot. Their entire professional identity is built on a doctrine that, if honestly examined, would be repudiated as nothing more than racial Marxism. So they will fight — inside the universities, inside the corporations, inside the courts, inside the federal bureaucracy, inside the cities they still run — for every inch of the ground the doctrine has captured. And the fight they will put up is one of the things that makes the coming Fourth Turning particularly dangerous. A Fourth Turning in which the political class is honest about what it has done — as FDR was honest about abandoning the gold standard, as Hamilton was honest about paying the state debts — can be resolved relatively quickly. A Fourth Turning in which the political class refuses to admit what caused the crisis and continues to fight for it is what leads to violence. Like during the Civil War of 1861-1865. And, sadly, I believe it will, once again, lead us into the equivalent of a race-based, low-level civil war. Why? Because there is no reform that fixes this. There is no tax increase that reverses disparate-impact jurisprudence. There is no interest-rate cut that restores public safety to Baltimore. There is no stimulus that teaches an Oregon high-school graduate to read. There is no political candidate who can, within the current legal and regulatory framework, restore the premise that individuals are to be judged as individuals and that the standards by which a society measures achievement are not themselves to be abandoned whenever they produce a disparity. The false doctrine, that individuals are not equal under the law because some people are functionally different than others, is embedded in statute. It is embedded in case law. It is embedded in the professional identity of three generations of administrators. It will not be uprooted by ordinary political means. It will be uprooted, if it is uprooted at all, by the same process that has uprooted every other entrenched false political doctrine in American history — by a Fourth Turning severe enough to make the doctrine’s defenders surrender ground they would never have surrendered in ordinary politics. And thus, you must be ready for what will come next. You cannot, by yourself, fix American public schools. But you can choose your children’s schools. You can homeschool them. You can place them in classical academies or Catholic schools or the small number of charter schools that have kept the older standards. You cannot, by yourself, fix the violence and mayhem in our cities. But you can own productive land. You can own real assets, directly, that will survive what's coming. You cannot, by yourself, fix the police. But you can choose where you live, you can choose whom you associate with, and you can prepare your family to defend itself and to help defend your neighbors. And you cannot, by yourself, fix the disparate-impact doctrine. But you can see it for what it is. You can teach your children to see it. You can refuse to participate in its rituals. You can decline to sign its loyalty oaths. You can, and this is perhaps the most important thing, tell the truth about it in public, in your own voice. How? By using the words it refuses to accept. “Marxism” is one of those words. “Per capita” is another – some groups are prone to violence, prone to ignorance, prone to abandoning their families. Pointing this out isn’t “racist.” It is identifying serious social problems that must be addressed and that cannot fixed by waving the magic wand of "disparate impact" or by an HR rule. "Responsibility” is a third. The entire racist agenda today is based on the idea that people can’t be responsible for their own lives because of racial oppression that ended more than three generations ago. The antidote to these lies is speaking the truth. Use these words. Do not flinch when the doctrine’s defenders accuse you of racism or bigotry. They are not interested in your character. They are interested in your silence. The doctrine has only ever had one real enemy, and it is not a political party or a candidate or a court. Its enemy is the plain speech of a free people. When free people describe what the doctrine has done — when they name it, in the ordinary language of their communities — the doctrine loses its power. Because its power was never in its arguments. Its power was in its capacity to intimidate people out of naming it. So, name it. That is the first political act of a Fourth Turning. Everything else that the country needs to do to get through the next decade — the monetary reset, the fiscal consolidation, the restoration of discipline in the schools, the re-policing of the cities, the rebuilding of standards across the institutions — depends on millions of ordinary Americans recovering the courage to call the thing by its true name. The true name is Marxism. The American form of it is disparate impact. Its consequence, measurable in the statistics of forty years, is the ruin of American institutions. The doctrine can be defeated. It has been defeated once before — in the Soviet Union, which built a more ambitious form of it at greater cost and collapsed under the weight of the contradictions it could not resolve. Ours is smaller and more refined and better camouflaged, but it is the same doctrine, and in the end it will collapse because of the same contradictions. The only question — the only question that matters, now — is whether we can name the doctrine and defeat it at the ballot box and in the courts and in the schools, or whether we will have to suffer a violent collapse of society. However it resolves, you must survive. The rest of this book is dedicated to helping you and your family survive whatever comes next.

🎶 On to the next one… predicting the next token From when I first started studying them in the 80’s, I have been fascinated by the emergent homologies between artificial and biological neural networks. From the emergence of similar hierarchical layers in vision systems to critical periods of curriculum learning, we now have evidence that our brains and our LLMs predict the next noun in a spoken sentence before hearing it. TLDR; from the Nature study below: when listening to an audiobook wired to EEG and MEG scanners, the brain activates structures for the anticipated next noun or adjective before hearing it. The brain does a form of next-token prediction. They fed the same audiobook into a Llama LLM and found the artificial neural net was doing the same thing, and like the humans, it was much better with nouns than verbs. This would come to no surprise to Jeff Hawkins, pictured here at his neuroscience institute. From his books, On Intelligence followed by A Thousand Brains, Jeff bravely presents a framework for how the brain works to produce intelligence from cells organized into ~150 thousand cortical columns. His decades of self-funded dedication to studying how the brain works affords a possibly unique and unifying perspective. In his first book, Hawkins presents a memory-prediction framework for intelligence. The neurons in the neocortex provide a vast amount of memory that learns a model of the world. These models continuously make low-level predictions in parallel across all of our senses. We only notice them when a prediction is incorrect. Higher in the hierarchy, we make predictions at higher levels of abstraction (the crux of intelligence, creativity and all that we consider being human), but the structures are fundamentally the same. If that is not mind-bending enough, in his latest book, Jeff extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”. Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. And in particular, sequence memory predicts the next note in a melody and “is also used for language. Recognizing a spoken work is like recognizing a short melody.” With that in mind, let’s jump to summary passages from the recent study: “The brain continuously generates predictions about incoming sensory inputs, including the next word during language comprehension” Large language “models rely almost entirely on predictive processes to generate language enabling them to approach - or even surpass - the Turing-Test with unprecedented proficiency. The human brain, too, is not a passive receiver, but an active ‘prediction machine’, constantly anticipating upcoming words and events” “If language indeed represents the fundamental ability required for the development of general intelligence, chain-of-thought reasoning and abstract cognition, and if grammar naturally emerges through language usage – thereby aligning brain mechanisms with patterns observed in deep neural networks – this raises the critical question: can LLMs trained solely on next-word prediction evolve into artificial general intelligence (AGI)?” From a prior study, “even a relatively simple neural network trained only on next-word prediction can spontaneously internalize basic grammatical structures. Hence, it seems plausible that the human brain, with its approximately 100 billion neurons, could accomplish this feat through continuous language-based prediction alone.” “We observed significant pre-onset activity for nouns… in a complementary analysis, we trained a linear probe neural network on the hidden states of Llama 3.2, revealing that nouns and adjectives are more easily predicted than verbs. We discuss our findings in the context of anticipatory frameworks in artificial neural networks, highlighting potential parallels between biological and computational approaches to language anticipation.” “In the EEG, nouns, adjectives, and proper nouns elicited a significant negative peak beginning before 0 seconds, whereas verbs showed no evidence of early anticipatory activity. The MEG data also revealed a significant peak around 0 seconds in left frontal channels for nouns, but not for the other word types, suggesting early predictive mechanisms specifically associated with this word class. [And with the LLM Llama] we found that the prediction probability for the next word is highest for the word class ‘noun’, and considerably lower for the other three word classes.” “We acknowledge that this represents only a preliminary step toward understanding syntactic and semantic processing by comparing LLMs and human brain activities. We present initial evidence suggesting that different transformer blocks may functionally correspond to distinct cortical regions, though further exploration is needed.” “Our analyses show that the predictive signal in the brain seems to consist of two components: a syntactic readiness, which can be observed in temporal regions, and a semantic readiness potential, mainly located in frontal areas. These convergent findings are consistent with the Bayesian framework of the brain, suggesting that both neural and computational systems continually update their internal models by integrating prior expectations with incoming information. Taken together, this evidence highlights the presence of distinct but complementary predictive mechanisms underlying semantic and syntactic processing in language comprehension.” “The question remains whether LLMs can serve as a valid model for understanding the human brain. Large language models are constructed as layered stacks of transformer blocks that operate via self-attention rather than explicit recurrent connections, yet their repetitive structure - characterized by self-similarity and fractal organization being a universal principle in biological structures - may serve as an analogue to the recurrent transmission of signals through the arcuate fasciculus. In the human brain, the arcuate fasciculus facilitates dynamic bidirectional communication between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, a pathway long proposed as the neural substrate for a universal innate grammar. Although LLMs do not replicate the full complexity of biological recurrence, the iterative processing achieved by stacking transformer blocks appears to approximate the brain’s integration of syntactic and semantic cues. These observations suggest that the self-similar structure of the LLM may provide valuable insights into the neural strategies underlying anticipatory activity and integrative processing during language comprehension.” “Our study demonstrates that prediction-related readiness in language processing operates through both syntactic and semantic anticipation, as reflected in distinct pre-word onset activity captured by combined MEG and EEG recordings.” “In addition, our results suggest that LLMs provide a computational framework that approximates human prediction-related readiness, with their stacked transformer blocks potentially mirroring the recurrent interactions between Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas via the arcuate fasciculus. The self-similar organization of these transformer architectures may reflect universal hierarchical principles of cognitive processing” “The fusion of generative AI and neural data has the potential to refine cognitive computational neuroscience (CCN) and provide deeper insights into the hierarchical organization of language processing in biological and artificial systems. Ultimately, bridging neuroscience, AI and linguistic theory may not only reveal the cognitive mechanisms that govern human language, but also drive the development of artificial intelligence - bringing it closer to the way the human brain anticipates and processes language” 🧠 -------- And I have transcribed my favorite passages from Hawkins most recent book, A Thousand Brains. I revisit them to learn. Travelling without moving, as we’ll see… “The cells in your head are reading these words. Think how remarkable that is.” “If you ignore folds and creases, then the neocortex looks like one large sheet of cells, with no obvious divisions. The neocortex looks similar everywhere. Every part of the neocortex generates movement. In every region we have examined, scientists have found cells that project to some part of the old brain related to movement. The complex circuitry seen everywhere in the neocortex performs a sensory-motor task. There are no pure motor regions and no pure sensory regions.” The cortex is relatively new development by evolutionary time scales. After a long period of simple reflexes and reptilian instincts, only mammals evolved a neocortex. “At some point millions of years ago, a new piece of the brain appears that we now call the neocortex. It starts small, but then grows larger, not by creating anything new, but by copying a basic circuit over and over. As the neocortex grows, it gets larger in area but not in thickness.” Given the recency, it’s “probably not enough time for multiple new complex capabilities to be discovered by evolution, but it’s plenty of time for evolution to make more copies of the same thing.” • Vernon Mountcastle’s proposition from 1978: “All the things we associate with intelligence, which on the surface appear to be different, are, in reality, manifestations of the same underlying cortical algorithm. Darwin proposed that the diversity of life is due to one basic algorithm (evolution). Mountcastle proposed that the diversity of intelligence is due to one basic algorithm.” Beyond the evolutionary time-scale argument, the brains’ vast flexibility to accept different, even prosthetic, sensory input changes and its ability to learn many different things point to a universal framework for learning. • Cortical Columns are “the largest and most important piece of the puzzle.” They are roughly one square millimeter in size with 100K neurons. A mouse has one column per whisker. “Every cortical column is making predictions. We are not aware of the vast majority of these predictions unless the input to the brain does not match.” • Learning through movement: “The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time. There isn’t another way to learn. Every time we take a step, move a limb, move our eyes, tilt our head, or utter a sound, the input from our sensors change. For example, our eyes make rapid movements, called saccades, about three times a second. With each saccade, our eyes fixate on a new point in the world and the information from the eyes to the brain changes completely.” We don’t perceive any of this because we are living in the model, which is predicting the next input to come, across all the senses. “Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement. Only by moving can we learn a model of the object.” “To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. We are not aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs.” “Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time (about 2% of the total). Individual neurons can participate in many different thoughts or experiences. Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were not previously connected.” • Locus of Predictions: “Oddly, less than 10% of the pyramidal cell’s synapses are in the proximal area. The other 90% are too far away to trigger a spike. For many years, no one knew what 90% of the synapses in the neocortex did. The big insight I had was that dendrite spikes are predictions. A dendrite spike occurs when a set of synapses close to each other on a distal dendrite get input at the same time, and it means the neuron had recognized a pattern of activity in some other neurons. When the pattern of activity is detected, it raises the voltage at the cell body, putting the cell into what we call a predictive state. The cell is primed to spike… and the cell spikes a little bit sooner than if it would have if the neuron was not in a predictive state.” And this inhibits other neurons from ever firing, the ones who were behind in that race. “When an input arrives that is unexpected, then neurons fire at once. If the input is predicted, then only the predictive-state neurons become active. This is a common observation about the neocortex: unexpected inputs cause a lot more activity than expected ones.” Predictions prime the pump, sub-threshold. “Predictions are not sent along a cell’s axon to other neurons, which explains why we are unaware of most of them.” “Most predictions occur inside neurons. With thousands of distal synapses, each neuron can recognize hundreds of patterns that predict when the neuron should become active. Prediction is built into the fabric of the neocortex. As few as 20,000 neurons can learn thousands of complete sequences. The sequence memory continued to work even if 30% of the neurons died or the input was noisy.” • Reference Frames: “The secret of the cortical column is reference frames. A reference frame is like an invisible, 3D-grid surrounding and attached to something” (like a map) “Predicting the next input in a sequence and predicting the next input when we move are similar problems. Our sequence-memory circuit could make both types of predictions if the neurons were given an additional input that represented how the sensor was moving.” “Most of the circuitry is there to create reference frames and track locations. The brain builds models of the world by associating sensory input with locations in reference frames. You need a reference frame to specify the relative position and structure of objects. Roboticists rely on them to plan the movements of a robot’s arm or body. Reference frames were the missing ingredient, the key to unraveling the mystery of the neocortex and to understanding intelligence. We showed that a single cortical column could learn the 3D shape of objects by sensing and moving and sensing and moving. Each cortical column must know the location of its input relative to the object being sensed. To do that, a cortical column requires a reference frame that is fixed to the object. The brain must have neurons whose activity represents the location of every object that we perceive.” “Mammals have a powerful internal navigation system. There are neurons in the old part of our brain that are known to learn maps of the places we have visited” — the hippocampus and enthorhinal cortex, organs roughly the size of a finger. “Place cells tell a rat where it is based on sensory inputs, but planning movement requires grid cells. Grid cells form a grid pattern. The two types of cells work together to create a complete model of the rat’s environment. Every time a rat enters an environment, the grid cells create a new reference frame to specify locations and plan movements.” In the new brain, these same cells and structures create models of objects instead of environments. “Every cortical column learns models of complete objects. The columns do this using the same basic method that the old brain uses to learn models of environments. It is as if nature stripped down the hippocampus to a minimal form, made tens of thousands of copies, and arranged them side by side in cortical columns. That became the neocortex. Each patch of your skin and each patch of your retina has its own reference frame in the neocortex. Your five fingertips touching a cup are like five rats exploring a box.” “Not all cortical columns are modeling objects. Language and other high-level cognitive abilities are, at some fundamental level, the same as seeing, touching, and hearing. The reference frames that are most useful for certain concepts have more than three dimensions.” • Thinking is a form of movement: “The brain arranges all knowledge using reference frames, and thinking is a form of moving. Thinking occurs when we activate successive locations in reference frames.” “A cortical column is just a mechanism that tries to discover and model the structure of whatever is causing its inputs to change” whether the structure of environments, physical objects or conceptual objects. “Reference frames are not an optional component of intelligence; they are the structure in which all information is stored in the brain. Every fact you know is paired with a location in a reference frame. Organizing knowledge this way makes the facts actionable” to “determine what actions are needed to achieve a goal.” “To recall stored knowledge, we have to activate the appropriate locations in the appropriate reference frames. Thinking occurs when the neurons invoke location after location in a reference frame, bringing to mind what was stored in each location. The succession of thoughts we experience when thinking is analogous to the succession of sensations we experience when touching an object with a finger, or the succession of things we see when we walk about a town.” • What and Where Pathways. “Your brain has two vision systems. If you follow the optic nerve as it travels from the eye to the neocortex, you will see that it leads to two parallel vision systems, called the ‘what’ visual pathway and the ‘where’ visual pathway.” If you disable one, you can identify what something is but not where, or vice versa. “Similar pathways also exist for other senses. There are what and where regions for seeing, touching, and hearing.” “Cortical grid cells in What columns attach reference frames to objects. Cortical grid cells in Where columns attach reference frames to you body.” The distinction depends on where the inputs come from. “If a cortical column gets input from the body, such as the neurons that detect the joint angles of the limbs, it will automatically create a reference frame anchored to the body.” “Your body is just another object in the world. However, unlike external objects, your body is always present. A significant portion of the neocortex — the Where regions — is dedicated to modeling your body and the space around your body.” For abstract concepts like mathematics, there are difference reference frames one could use to learn. “Part of learning is discovering what is a good reference frame, including the number of dimensions.” History can be learned on a timeline, or geographically. “They lead to different ways of thinking about history. They might lead to different conclusions and different predictions. Becoming an expert in a field of study requires discovering a good framework to represent the associated data and facts. Discovering a useful reference frame is most difficult part of learning, even though most of the time we are not consciously aware of it.” It's no surprise that the memory trick called the memory palace, is a good method for remembering a large sequential list of nouns. From fMRI studies, “the process of storing items in a reference frame and recalling them via ‘movement’ is the same.” “Nested structure and recursion are key attributes of language. Each cortical column has to be able to learn nested and recursive structure. Cortical columns create reference frames for every object they know. Reference frames are then populated with links to other reference frames. The brain models the world using reference frames that are populated with reference frames; it’s reference frames all the way down.” • The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence: The prevailing view of the neocortex was a hierarchy of feature detectors, from edge detectors up to face detectors. Jeff argues that each and every column is a sensory-motor system. “When the eyes saccade from one fixation point to another, some of the neurons in the V1 and V2 visual regions do something remarkable. They seem to know what they will be seeing before the eyes have stopped moving. These neurons become active as if they can see new input, but the input hasn’t yet arrived. There are connections between low-level visual regions and low-level touch regions.” Mouse vision occurs in the V1 region; it does not depend on a hierarchy of vision abstractions. “All cortical columns, even in low-level sensory regions, are capable of learning and recognizing complete objects. A column that senses only a small part of an object (e.g., from a patch of retina) can learn a model of the entire object by integrating its inputs over time.” “Learning is not a separate process from sensing and acting. We learn continuously. When a neuron learns a new pattern, it forms new synapses on one dendrite branch. The new synapses don’t affect previously learned ones on other branches. Thus, learning doesn’t force the neuron to forget or modify something it learned earlier.” It’s additive. “What a column learns is limited by its inputs. Columns in V1 can recognize letters and words in the smallest font. V1 and V2 learn models of objects, such as letters and words, but the models differ by scale.” “Knowledge of something is distributed in thousands of columns, but these are a small subset of all the columns. This is why we call it the Thousand Brains Theory: knowledge of any particular item is distributed among thousands of complimentary models. The columns are not redundant, and each is a complete sensory-motor system.” • The Solution to Sensor Fusion and the Binding Problem: “Columns vote. Your perception is the consensus the columns reach by voting.” “If you touch something with only one finger, then you have to move it to recognize the object. But if you grasp the object with your entire hand, then you can usually recognize the object at once. In almost all cases, using five fingers will require less movement than using one.” (made me think of reading Braille with multiple fingers). “Voting works across sensory modalities (sight, touch, etc.)” How? “Cells in some layers send axons long distances within the neocortex” between left and right-hand brain regions or between V1 and A1, the primary vision and auditory regions. “These cells with long-distance connections are voting. Cells that represent what object is being sensed can vote and will project broadly. Often a column will be uncertain, in which case its neurons will send multiple possibilities at the same time. Simultaneously, the column receives projections from other columns representing their guesses. The most common guesses suppress the least common ones until the entire network settles on one answer. The voting mechanism works well even if the long-distance axons connect to a small, randomly chosen subset of other columns” • The Stability of Perception with ever-changing inputs: “What we perceive is based on the stable voting neurons. We are not consciously aware of the changing activity in each column.” Roughly 98% are silent at any given time and 2% are continuously firing. Consider the experience of an optical illusion duality (like the drawing of a pair of faces or vase); you can only see one at a time, and there is a delay if you force yourself to switch. “Recognizing an object in one sensory modality leads to predictions in other sensory modalities.” • Attention: We have the perception of multiple objects in our visual field even though we can only attend to one at a time. “Attention plays an essential role in how the brain learns models. The brain can attend to smaller or larger parts of the visual field. Exactly how the brain does this is not well understood, but it involves a part of the brain called the thalamus, which is tightly connected to all areas of the neocortex. It is so intimately connected to the neocortex that I consider it an extension of the neocortex.” • Consciousness: “Neurons form a continuous memory of both our thoughts and actions. It is this accessibility of the past — the ability to jump back in time and slide forward again to the present — that gives us our sense of presence and awareness. This is the core of what it means to be conscious. If we couldn’t replay our recent thoughts and experiences, then we would be unaware we are alive.” “The neocortex does not directly control any muscles. The neocortex has to be attached to something that already has sensors and already has behaviors (the primitive brain). It does not create completely new behaviors; it learns how to string together existing ones in new and useful ways.” “Reverse engineering the brain and understanding intelligence is the most important scientific quest humans will ever undertake.”