Author’s Note: I apologize for not hitting your inbox consistently over the last few weeks — there have been a lot of changes in my personal life that have kept me busy. Luckily, the dust has started to settle so you can continue to expect Synapse twice a month going forward!

One of my goals for Synapse going into 2021 was to write more about how the brain actually works. There are a mountain of facts about the brain that you can find in neuroscience textbooks. Over 100 years, hundreds of thousands of papers, and millions of hours of research have resulted in many detailed understandings of aspects of the complex organ between our ears, yet if you ask an expert in this field to explain—succinctly—how the brain creates intelligence, you aren’t going to get a satisfying answer.

In 1979, Francis Crick famously wrote:

“In Spite of the steady accumulation of detailed knowledge, how the brain works is still profoundly mysterious.”

Neuroscience is still looking for a theory of intelligence that will do for the field what Einstein’s theory of special relativity did for physics: provide a lens through which to interpret the collection of facts we have about how the brain works.

One scientist who is working to get us closer to that goal is Jeff Hawkins, computer pioneer, neuroscientist, and cofounder of the neuroscience company Numenta. He as written a book titled A Thousand Brains and I’m going to share with you a few key insights that have fascinated me from this book over the next few editions of the Synapse.

Living is a tall task for a brain

The first thing that Hawkins highlights in his book is the astonishingly complex task that just living everyday life presents for a brain. Over the course of our life, we have to learn what hundreds of thousands of objects look, sound, and feel like, hold tens of thousands of words in our vocabulary, and build relationships with a couple hundred people. We have a remember where everything important is in our environment, learn high level concepts such as “justice”, and keep track of our memories and plan for the future.

Oh, and do all of this while keeping track of our own bodies in time and space for every moment we are awake.

Living is a incredibly tall task for a brain and so a question naturally