Hawkins believes that the several levels of the neocortex are an organizational hierarchy of sensory inputs.

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His thesis for how the neocortex works is that it has a uniform algorithm.

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Though humans are limited to 300 million pattern recognizers, only the neocortex can do hierarchical thinking and only mammals have a neocortex.

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"The brain is organised into multiple levels of control including the spinal cord at the low level to the neocortex at the high level, " he said.

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Deep-learning software tries to emulate, albeit in a still primitive way, the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the human brain where thinking occurs.

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The third part of the brain is the neocortex.

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Traveling down from the top of the hierarchy to the base sensations, he figures, the neocortex functions as a prediction machine, anticipating what we will see next, where the ball is headed or how an experiment might turn out.

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Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool, has studied primates and discovered a surprisingly stable ratio between the relative size of the neocortex (thought to be responsible for the evolution of intelligence) and the size of groups formed by particular species.

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Hawkins, who will continue to work as chief technical officer of Treo maker palmOne (nasdaq: PLMO - news - people ), already has his own research lab to study the neocortex, a massive part of the brain thought to hold such higher level functions as language, learning, memory and complex thought.

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