On Intelligence
book by Jeff Hawkins
On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines is a 2004 book by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee. The book explains Hawkins' memory-prediction framework theory of the brain and describes some of its consequences.
The theory
Hawkins' basic idea is that the brain is a mechanism to predict the future, specifically, hierarchical regions of the brain predict their future input sequences. Perhaps not always far in the future, but far enough to be of real use to an organism. As such, the brain is a feed forward hierarchical state machine with special properties that enable it to learn.
The state machine actually controls the behavior of the organism. Since it is a feed forward state machine, the machine responds to future events predicted from past data.
The hierarchy is capable of memorizing frequently observed sequences (Cognitive modules) of patterns and developing invariant representations. Higher levels of the cortical hierarchy predict the future on a longer time scale, or over a wider range of sensory input. Lower levels interpret or control limited domains of experience, or sensory or effector systems.
The public source identifies “On Intelligence” as book by Jeff Hawkins. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Intelligence, book and Jeff.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4329050. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “On Intelligence” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.