Experts from the American company Numenta have published a new theory of the neocortex - new areas of the cerebral cortex responsible for sensory perception and conscious thinking. She explains that our brain works in a completely different way than previously thought - instead of one model of the world, it simultaneously studies thousands.
Despite the fact that neuroscientists have accumulated a huge store of knowledge about the brain, there is still no unifying theory of what intelligence is and how it develops in the brain. The work by Numentia researchers, published in the journal Frontiers in Neural Circuits, provides a starting point for understanding the functions of the neocortex, writes EurekAlert.
The main point of the article relates to the so-called lattice neurons in the entorhinal cortex, an older part of the brain that provides orientation in space. Scientists have suggested that the same lattices should exist in the neocortex. There they are responsible for studying object models. And how we understand the structure and behavior of objects in space depends on the neocortex.
“The neocortex is made up of repetitive patterns that shape our perception, language, and highly organized thoughts. We identified a key element of this schema that was missing, and this led us to a cascade of discoveries, including how the neocortex works and a new structure for all forms of conscious reasoning,”says Jeff Hawkins, co-founder of Numenta.
Among the announced discoveries is a new type of "displacement neurons", which together with lattice neurons represent the position of objects relative to each other. These cells provide the skill of generalization, that is, they allow the neocortex to learn new objects as combinations of already studied objects.
Numenta's new theory could explain how consciousness arises in the brain and become the starting point for the creation of a future artificial intelligence that can overcome the difficulties encountered on the path of deep learning.
Israeli scientists were able to get closer to understanding the work of the intellect. They traced in the cells of the human brain the sequence of events that are associated with the transformation of a visual image into an abstract one and were able to localize the source of consciousness.
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Georgy Golovanov