Neuroscience exploration - Your Brain Is 150,000 Mini-Brains

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit https://brilliant.org/ArtemKirsanov/ . You’ll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. ===== My name is Artem, I'm a neuroscience PhD student at Harvard University. 🌎 Website and Social links: https://kirsanov.ai/ 📥 "Receptive Field" neuro-newsletter: https://artemkirsanov.substack.com/ ✨ Support me on Patreon to get access to Discord community: https://patreon.com/artemkirsanov ===== How does the 3mm-thick sheet of cells on the surface of our brain give rise to everything we consider human intelligence? In this video we explore one of the most compelling answers to that question: Jeff Hawkins' "Thousand Brains Theory" and the neurobiology behind cortical columns. We will see how every cortical column is a complete sensorimotor system, discuss all six neuronal layers of the cortex to see how they work together to build predictive models of the world through a constant loop of sensation, movement, and consensus voting. 🕒 OUTLINE: 00:00 Introduction 00:57 Columnar Hypothesis 03:07 Predictive Models of the world 05:05 Sensorimotor coupling 07:53 Evolutionary origins 10:43 Anatomy of the column 14:19 Consensus Voting 17:42 Putting all together 19:47 Brilliant 📚 FURTHER READING & REFERENCES: For those who want to dive deeper into the science: 1. Hawkins, J. (2021). A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. (Book co-authored with Richard Dawkins). 2. Clay, V. et al. (2024). The Thousand Brains Project: A New Paradigm for Sensorimotor Intelligence. 3. Hawkins, J. et al. (2019). A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex. Frontiers in Neural Circuits. 4. Hawkins, J. & Ahmad, S. (2016). Why Neurons Have Thousands of Synapses, a Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex. Frontiers in Neural Circuits. 5. Harris, K.D. & Shepherd, G.M.G. (2015). The neocortical circuit: themes and variations. Nature Neuroscience. 6. Haueis, P. (2016). The life of the cortical column: opening the domain of functional architecture of the cortex (1955–1981). History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. 7. Hawkins, J. (N.d.). A Theory of How Columns in the Neocortex Enable Learning the Structure of the World. Numenta Whitepaper. 8. Hawkins, J., Leadholm, N., Clay, V., 2025. Hierarchy or Heterarchy? A Theory of Long-Range Connections for the Sensorimotor Brain. 9. Leadholm, N., Clay, V., Knudstrup, S., Lee, H., Hawkins, J., 2025. Thousand-Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference. ===== Music by Artlist This video was sponsored by Brilliant ===== **Disclaimer:** This channel is my personal project. The views and content expressed here are my own and are separate from my research role at Harvard University. _Description remastered: February 2026. Links & Bio updated; original context preserved._