Books

(alphabetically)

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence

by Jeff Hawkins

A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains

by Max Bennett

Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation

by Christopher Kemp

Exploring the Thalamus and Its Role in Cortical Function

by S. Murray Sherman and R. W. Guillery

On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blekeslee

Perceptual Neuroscience: The Cerebral Cortex

by Vernon B. Mountcastle

Toward Human-Level Artificial Intelligence: How Neuroscience Can Inform the Pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence or General AI

by Eitan M. Azoff

Papers

(by year)

This is an extremely stripped-down list of the hundreds of papers on which our theory and ideas are based. We tried to collect a few key review articles summarizing important findings that we regularly come back to in our research meetings.

Neuroscience

Felleman, D. J., & Van Essen, D. C. (1991). Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 1(1), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/1.1.1

Mountcastle, V. (1997). The columnar organization of the neocortex. Brain, 120(4), 701–722. https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/120.4.701

Thomson, A. (2003). Interlaminar connections in the neocortex. Cerebral Cortex, 13(1), 5–14. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/13.1.5

Markram, H., Toledo-Rodriguez, M., Wang, Y., Gupta, A., Silberberg, G., & Wu, C. (2004). Interneurons of the neocortical inhibitory system. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(10), 793–807. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1519

Sherman, S. M. (2005). Thalamic relays and cortical functioning. In Progress in Brain Research (Vol. 149, pp. 107–126). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-6123(05)49009-3

Hegdé, J., & Felleman, D. J. (2007). Reappraising the functional implications of the primate visual anatomical hierarchy. The Neuroscientist, 13(5), 416–421. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858407305201

Thomson, A. M. (2007). Functional maps of neocortical local circuitry. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 1(1), 19–42. https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.1.1.002.2007

Thomson, A. (2010). Neocortical layer 6, a review. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 4, Article 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2010.00013

Sherman, S. M., & Guillery, R. W. (2011). Distinct functions for direct and transthalamic corticocortical connections. Journal of Neurophysiology, 106(3), 1068–1077. https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00429.2011

Petersen, C. C. H., & Crochet, S. (2013). Synaptic computation and sensory processing in neocortical layer 2/3. Neuron, 78(1), 28–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.03.020

Gu, Y., Lewallen, S., Kinkhabwala, A. A., Domnisoru, C., Yoon, K., Gauthier, J. L., Fiete, I. R., & Tank, D. W. (2018). A map-like micro-organization of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex. Cell, 175(3), 736–750.e30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.08.066

Theory

Usrey, W. M., & Sherman, S. M. (2019). Corticofugal circuits: Communication lines from the cortex to the rest of the brain. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 527(3), 640–650. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.24423

Whittington, J. C. R., Muller, T. H., Mark, S., Chen, G., Barry, C., Burgess, N., & Behrens, T. E. J. (2020). The Tolman-Eichenbaum machine: Unifying space and relational memory through generalization in the hippocampal formation. Cell, 183(5), 1249–1263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.024

Rao, R. P. N. (2022). A sensory-motor theory of the neocortex based on active predictive coding. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.30.522267

Suzuki, M., Pennartz, C. M. A., & Aru, J. (2023). How deep is the brain? The shallow brain hypothesis. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00756-z

Our Papers

Hawkins, J., & Ahmad, S. (2016). Why neurons have thousands of synapses: A theory of sequence memory in neocortex. Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 10, Article 23. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2016.00023

Hawkins, J., Ahmad, S., & Cui, Y. (2017). A theory of how columns in the neocortex enable learning the structure of the world. Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 11, Article 81. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2017.00081

Ahmad, S., & Scheinkman, L. (2019). How can we be so dense? The benefits of using highly sparse representations. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11257

Hawkins, J., Lewis, M., Klukas, M., Purdy, S., & Ahmad, S. (2019). A framework for intelligence and cortical function based on grid cells in the neocortex. Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 12, Article 121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2018.00121

Hole, K. J., & Ahmad, S. (2021). A thousand brains: Toward biologically constrained AI. SN Applied Sciences, 3(8), 743. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-021-04715-0

Clay, V., Leadholm, N., & Hawkins, J. (2024). The Thousand Brains Project: A New Paradigm for Sensorimotor Intelligence. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18354#

Leadholm, N., Clay, V., Knudstrup, S., Lee, H., Hawkins, J. (2025) Thousand-Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04494

📘
You can read the Thousand-Brains Systems Plain Language Explainer for a less technical overview of the concepts in the above paper.

Hawkins, J., Leadholm, N., Clay, V. (2025) Hierarchy or Heterarchy? A Theory of Long-Range Connections for the Sensorimotor Brain arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05888

📘
You can read the Hierarchy or Heterarchy Plain Language Explainer for a less technical overview of the concepts in the above paper.

Other Resources

Videos

As we are working on the neuroscience theory, we are publishing recordings of those meetings on our YouTube channel. Those videos contain our most up-to-date thinking and the questions we are struggling with on a day-to-day basis. If you are curious in the neuroscience behind this project, you can have a look at your brainstorming and review video series. For a short introduction to the project you can have a look at our quick-start series and for a longer overview of key aspects of the project our core video series.

Below is a great introductory video of Jeff Hawkins presenting an overview of our neuroscience theory.

Help Us Make This Page Better

All our docs are open-source. If something is wrong or unclear, submit a PR to fix it!

Make a Contribution

Learn how to contribute to our docs