Some years ago after his trip around England, my uncle told us that we are descendants from the great scientist, Michael Faraday. I’ve used that as evidence that genetically:
(a) brains cannot pass down facts, since electromagnetism was one of my weak areas in physics, but:
(b) brains can pass down traits, such as persistence in understanding unknown phenomena. In Faraday’s case, it led to amazing scientific achievements and in my case it led to decades of study on how brains work and how to replicate that, especially for language understanding.
Introduction
One of the things holding back progress in artificial intelligence (AI) research is an effective working knowledge of how brains work. Of course, my answer is to embrace Patom theory (PT), my theoretical neuroscience approach from the late 1990s because it not only explains the myriad of observations that we have through brain scanning and the effects of documented damage, but also it identifies how learning builds up through experience. At the time when I was refining Patom theory, the dominant paradigm was processing and construction. That has evolved slightly to the present where prediction is dominant.
