A Thousand Brains summary

Let’s begin by visualizing the structure of the brain.

First, imagine making a pot of spaghetti. Now picture cutting each piece of spaghetti into lengths a tenth of an inch long (that’s 2.5 mm), and holding one of these little guys upright, like a tiny Roman column. Now virtually stick these miniature spaghetti pillars side by side until you make a sheet of 150,000 pieces – about the size of a dinner cloth. With us so far?

So, now imagine that every single thing you know or could know about the world – everything you’ve ever thought, seen, heard, or imagined in your entire life – is inside that sheet.

This symbolizes your neocortex, and it’s a wrinkly, folded piece of brain matter which takes up about 70 percent of the space inside your skull. It’s called neocortex because it’s believed to have evolved relatively recently. It wraps around brain regions that are older, like the limbic system – the so-called reptile brain. 

The little spaghetti pieces are what Hawkins calls cortical columns. These columns aren’t visible to the naked eye – the cortex just looks like one big, crinkly sheet – but they’re there if you look under a microscope. They’re patterns of how neurons connect: tiny column-like structures of neural wiring. 

The neocortex lets you see, hear, touch, talk, and think. It lets you learn languages, do math, paint watercolors, and ponder philosophy. But here's the puzzle: despite governing all these totally different functions, your neocortex looks pretty much the same everywhere. Strange, right?

And not only that, but it closely resembles the neocortex of other mammals – animals who can’t speak languages, solve Rubik’s Cubes, and learn quantum physics. 

So how is this possible? How can this one type of brain tissue, this one repeating structure that is the cortical column, do so many different things? 

That’s the question we’re going to answer.