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