All quotes from
Jeff's book
The biggest mistake is the belief that intelligence
is defined by intelligent behavior.
When you don't know how to proceed, often the best
strategy is to make no changes
until your options become clear.
All your brain knows is patterns. Your perceptions and knowledge about the
world are built from
these patterns. There's no light inside your head. It's
dark in there. There's no sound
entering
your brain either. It's quiet inside. In fact, the brain is the only part of your
body that has no senses
itself. A
surgeon could stick a finger into your brain and you wouldn't feel it. All the information
that enters your mind
comes in as spatial and temporal patterns on the axons.
Patterns are the fundamental currency of
intelligence.
All our knowledge of the world is a model based on
patterns.... There is no such thing as direct
perception.... The brain is in a
dark quiet box with no knowledge of anything other than the
time-flowing
patterns on its input fibers. Your
perception of the world is created from these
patterns, nothing else.
The brain does not "compute" the answers to
problems; it retrieves the answers from memory.
Thoughts and memories are associatively linked, and
random thoughts never really occur.
Inputs
to the brain auto-associatively link to themselves, filling in
the present, and auto-associatively link
to what normally follows next. We call this chain of memories thought.
Our brains use stored memories to constantly make
predictions about everything we see, feel
and hear.
Your brain makes low-level sensory predictions about
what it expects to see, hear, and feel at
every given moment, and it does so in
parallel. All regions of your neocortex
are simultaneously
trying to predict what their next experience will be.
We like to say seeing is believing. Yet we see what we expect to see as often as
we see
what we really see.
If you spend some time observing yourself, you can
begin to understand that your perception
of the world, your understanding of
the world, is intimately tied to prediction.
Your brain has
made a model of the world and is constantly checking that
model against reality.
