Comments on: On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer || April || 2010

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:19:37 +0000

[...] optimize decisions among many conflicting dimensions. It is also extremely fast – it works by training neural circuits to recognize previously seen situations and respond quickly without involvi…. When we are developing our 10,000 hours of expertise, we are building the necessary neural [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Cognitive Theories of Corporations || January || 2010

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:36:47 +0000

[...] view of how we think has been shown to be incomplete, at best. Books like The User Illusion and On Intelligence describe an unconscious mind which is doing so much processing and filtering that it can often [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Story Metrics || October || 2008

Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:42:13 +0000

[...] and behave, which can provide guidance in interacting with others. In another variation of this, our brains are wired to remember deviations from the norm, as that was what enabled us to survive in a dangerous environment, so one could imagine that [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Intelligent organizations || June || 2008

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:27:10 +0000

[...] was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Strategic Intuition and Expertise || June || 2008

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:33:56 +0000

[...] the intelligent memory hypothesis of how the brain works, which I assume is what is described by Hawkins in On Intelligence. I see how that would apply to expert intuition, which builds in common responses at lower layers [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Learning by repetition and memorization || January || 2008

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:14:42 +0000

[...] as possible to our unconscious brains. We have to build cognitive subroutines and embed the pattern recognition into our brains so that the conscious brain doesn’t need to think – we just recognize the input pattern and [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Telling the story of our lives || May || 2007

Fri, 25 May 2007 12:24:40 +0000

[...] But raw data is incomplete. It doesn’t mean anything. It needs us to make sense of it, to find the patterns, so that we can use those patterns to make future decisions. Without stories to bind it together, [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Filling in the blanks part 2 || December || 2005

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:32:19 +0000

[...] to use Jeff Hawkins’s terminology, a set of cortical cells are activated by a stimulus, and based on the cells’ responses to [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Made to Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath || February || 2007

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 03:31:27 +0000

[...] They looked at different advertising campaigns, from the Jared diet at Subway to “Don’t Mess with Texas”, and tried to extract the common themes and elements that they saw. Their acronym for what makes an idea sticky is SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story. You have to have a core idea that can be expressed in a single sentence or phrase. If you can’t boil it down to something that simple, it will never stick. It has to be unexpected and surprising – our brains are “wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned”. It must be concrete, because humans each interpret abstractions differently – only by making an idea specific and concrete can you assure that it will be remembered and passed on unchanged. It must be credible – if it is not easily verifiable, it will be dismissed as outlandish. Emotions play a strong role in memory, so it’s not surprising that ideas that evoke emotions are more sticky. And my favorite topic, stories, make ideas sticky because we remember stories as exemplars of patterns that matter to us. [...]

By: Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist || Patterns, stories and communities || December || 2006

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 20:05:50 +0000

[...] My thesis of the day is that the general patterns I was talking about are stories. I circle back to the topic of stories pretty regularly, as I find that stories are extremely powerful patterns that our brains are structured to absorb. For instance, I regularly tell stories that I don’t know the origin of; I don’t remember where I read or heard the story or even many of the specific details, but the general pattern of the story itself was memorable and sticks with me. I think the reason for that is that our brains are wired to remember patterns, not details, and our predilection for stories reflects that. [...]