Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	44	Neurons have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of synapses, spaced along the branches of the dendrites.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	45	Less than 10% of the cell's synapses are in the proximal area near the cell body. The other 90% are too far away to cause a spike.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	A prediction occurs when a neuron recognizes a pattern [in the ~10,000 synapses in its dendrites], creates a dendrite spike, and is primed to spike earlier than other neurons.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	Each neuron can recognize hundreds of patterns that predict when the neuron should become active.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	Prediction is built into the fabric of the neocortex, the neuron.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	We wrote software simulations that tested its capacity and were surprised to find that as few as 20,000 neurons can learn thousands of complete sequences
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	Sequence memory continued to work even if 30% of the neurons died or if the input was noisy.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	47	The function of the cortical column is reference frames.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	49		Different parts of the body (fingertips, palm, lips) might touch the coffee cup at the same time. The brain isn't making one prediction:; it's making dozens or even hundreds of predictions at the same time.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		The neocortex must know the location, relative to the cup, of every part of my body that is touching it.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		Vision is doing the same thing as touch. Each patch of your retina sees only a small part of an entire object.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		The visual cortex assigns each piece to a location relative to the object being observed.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		Since the complex circuitry in every cortical column is similar, location and reference frames must be universal properties of the neocortex.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		Each column in the neocortex – whether it represents visual input, tactile input, auditory input, language, or high-level thought – must have neurons that represent reference frames and locations.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	50		The brain builds models of the world by associating sensory input with locations and reference frames.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	51		By defining an object using a reference frame, the brain can manipulate the entire object at once.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	51		The function of most of the neurons in each cortical column is to create reference frames and track locations
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	51		Vernon Mountcastle argued that there was a universal algorithm that exists in every cortical column, yet he didn't know what the algorithm was.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	51		Francis Crick wrote that we needed a new framework to understand the brain, yet he didn't know what the framework should be.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	51		Mountcastle's algorithm and Crick's framework were both based on reference frames.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	53		The entire neocortex works by creating reference frames, with many thousands active simultaneously.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	55		Each cortical column must know the location of its input relative to the object being sensed.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	65		Altghough a cortical column is tiny, about 1 mm on a side, each of these layers might have 10,000 neurons.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	65		Upper layer receives the sensory input to the column. When it arrives, it causes several hundred neurons to become active.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	66		Bottom layer represents the current location in a reference frame.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	68		Every cortical column learns models of objects.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	68		Each cortical column has a set of cells the grid cells, another set equivalent to place cells, and another set equivalent to head direction cells, all of which were first discovered in parts of the old brain.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	68		There are about 150,000 columns in the human cortex.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	69		Mountcastle proposed that every column in the neocortex performs the same basic function.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	69		Language, and other high-level cognitive abilities, at some fundamental level are the same as seeing, touching, and hearing.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	69		Mountcastle deduced that there must be some basic function that underlies everything the neocortex does – not just perception, but all the things we think of as intelligence.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	70		The reference frame allows a cortical column to learn the locations of features that define the shape of an object.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	70		We can think of reference frames as a way to organize any kind of knowledge.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	72		Cells that create reference frames are similar, but not identical, to the grid cells and place cells found in older parts of the brain.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	72		A column is a mechanism built of neurons that blindly tries to discover and model the structure of whatever it is causing its inputs to change.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	72		Brains once again evolved to use that same mechanism to learn and represent the structure underlying conceptual objects, such as mathematics and democracy.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	73		Thinking occurs when the neurons invoke location after location in a reference frame, bringing to mind what was stored in each location.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	97		Where is knowledge stored in the brain? Knowledge in the brain is distributed. Knowledge of something is distributed in thousands of columns, but they are a small subset of all the columns.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	97		A column in V2 gets input from a large area of the retina, but the image is fuzzier.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	98				A neuron never depends on a single synapse. Instead, it might use 30 synapses to recognize a pattern.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	98				A network of neurons is never dependent on a single cell. Even the loss of 30% of the neurons usually has only a marginal effect on the performance of the network.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	98				The neocortex is not dependent on a single cortical column. The brain continues to function even if a stroke or trauma wipes out thousands of columns.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	102			Cells in some layers send axons long distances within the neocortex. We propose that the cells with long-distance connections are voting.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	102	The basic idea of how columns can vote is not complicated. Using its long-range connections, a column broadcasts what it thinks it is observing. 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.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	103	The voting neurons in each column form a stable pattern that represents the object and where it is relative to you.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	103	What we perceive is based on the stable voting neurons.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	103	The information from these neurons is spread broadly to other areas of the brain, where it can be turned into language or stored in short-term memory.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	104		The number of voting neurons active at any time is small.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	104		If you were looking at the neurons responsible for voting, you might see 98% of the cells being silent and 2% continuously firing.
Hawkins - A Thousand Brains	105	Attention plays an essential role in how the brain learns models.