A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex
Despite the massive amount of detail neuroscientists have amassed about the neocortex, how it works is still a mystery. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretical framework for understanding what the neocortex does and how it does it.
Our proposal is based upon grid cells. The study of grid cells has been one of the most exciting areas of neuroscience over the past decade. Found in the entorhinal cortex, grid cells are used in navigation and are a powerful neural mechanism for representing the location of a body in the environment. We propose that the same mechanisms in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus that originally evolved for learning the structure of environments are now used by the neocortex to learn the structure of objects. The mechanism involves pairing location signals with sensory input over time.
The framework suggests mechanisms for how the cortex represents object compositionality, object behaviors and even high-level concepts. It leads to the hypothesis that every part of the neocortex learns complete models of objects. Unlike traditional hierarchical ideas where objects are learned only at the top, the paper proposes that there are many models of each object distributed throughout the neocortex. We call this hypothesis the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence.
