On Intelligence

About the book

In On Intelligence, Jeff Hawkins, with Sandra Blakeslee, proposes a new way of understanding the human mind: intelligence arises not merely from behaviour, calculation or the accumulation of information, but from the brain’s ability to build models of the world and continually predict what will happen.

Starting with the workings of the neocortex, Hawkins presents the memory–prediction model as a key to explaining perception, learning, creativity, language and abstract thought. The brain does not simply receive data: it compares each experience with previously learned patterns, anticipates what should come next and draws our attention when reality contradicts the prediction.

This perspective also allows us to rethink the future of artificial intelligence. For Hawkins, truly intelligent machines will not merely execute rules or process information; they will learn structured models of the world and use them to understand, predict and act.

Clear, accessible and firmly focused on essentials, this book opens the door to a decisive question: what, after all, is intelligence — and how might we recreate it?