---
updatedAt: 2026-07-15T10:04:07.000Z
agentTools:
  projectIndex: https://docs.thousandbrains.org/llms.txt
---

# Further Reading

Here we put a list of books and papers that might be interesting for you if you are interested in this project.

# Books

*(alphabetically)*

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/3b156ef3ddf318743205f47472e4c91420c0083ba2b6db75ab9eb7285b477361-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "left",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence**

by Jeff Hawkins

<br />

<br />

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/2a073c43091330ce77502fe2fc891c5c6ef97fdf376d04d2eed27247295ad706-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "right",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

<br />

**A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs that Made our Brains**

by Max Bennett

<br />

<br />

<br />

<br />
<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/6eb0965e920305ad5ef5b0f1a359cc1687008e5809468aed3b4d47a54d64c876-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "left",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation**

by Christopher Kemp

<br />

<br />

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/79cbea8f20a7a9945d87df91a9797bdbfb20c87c4b9563159b19c684f012c50e-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "right",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**Exploring the Thalamus and Its Role in Cortical Function**

by  S. Murray Sherman and R. W. Guillery

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />

<br />
<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/cf85399b11ecef528e8d3f1f98dcf27ff12d9aef7ca28df488b42f75f394714f-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "left",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines**

by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blekeslee

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />

<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/c001bf6d4ba8b83c1b512b247b864e8735d2ba24ca565295eb829572305d6c0e-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "right",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**Perceptual Neuroscience: The Cerebral Cortex**

by Vernon B. Mountcastle

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />

<br />

<br />

[block:image]
{
  "images": [
    {
      "image": [
        "https://files.readme.io/9f2734f88c1e6148cf81f8ce416986f9f9ffc8769cc929fd6196e60dab6bd53f-image.png",
        null,
        ""
      ],
      "align": "left",
      "sizing": "150px"
    }
  ]
}
[/block]

**Toward Human-Level Artificial Intelligence: How Neuroscience Can Inform the Pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence or General AI**

by Eitan M. Azoff

<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />

<br />
<br />
<br />

# Papers

*(by year)*

This is an extremely stripped-down list of the hundreds of papers on which our theory and ideas are based. We tried to collect a few key review articles summarizing important findings that we regularly come back to in our research meetings.

## Neuroscience

Felleman, D. J., & Van Essen, D. C. (1991). **Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex.** Cerebral Cortex, 1(1), 1–47. <https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/1.1.1>

Mountcastle, V. (1997). **The columnar organization of the neocortex.** Brain, 120(4), 701–722. <https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/120.4.701>

Thomson, A. (2003). **Interlaminar connections in the neocortex.** Cerebral Cortex, 13(1), 5–14. <https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/13.1.5>

Markram, H., Toledo-Rodriguez, M., Wang, Y., Gupta, A., Silberberg, G., & Wu, C. (2004). **Interneurons of the neocortical inhibitory system**. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5(10), 793–807. <https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1519>

Sherman, S. M. (2005). **Thalamic relays and cortical functioning.** In Progress in Brain Research (Vol. 149, pp. 107–126). Elsevier. <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0079-6123(05)49009-3>

Hegdé, J., & Felleman, D. J. (2007). **Reappraising the functional implications of the primate visual anatomical hierarchy.** The Neuroscientist, 13(5), 416–421. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1073858407305201>

Thomson, A. M. (2007). **Functional maps of neocortical local circuitry.** Frontiers in Neuroscience, 1(1), 19–42. <https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.01.1.1.002.2007>

Thomson, A. (2010). **Neocortical layer 6, a review**. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, 4, Article 13. <https://doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2010.00013>

Sherman, S. M., & Guillery, R. W. (2011). **Distinct functions for direct and transthalamic corticocortical connections.** Journal of Neurophysiology, 106(3), 1068–1077. <https://doi.org/10.1152/jn.00429.2011>

Petersen, C. C. H., & Crochet, S. (2013). **Synaptic computation and sensory processing in neocortical layer 2/3.** Neuron, 78(1), 28–48. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2013.03.020>

Gu, Y., Lewallen, S., Kinkhabwala, A. A., Domnisoru, C., Yoon, K., Gauthier, J. L., Fiete, I. R., & Tank, D. W. (2018). **A map-like micro-organization of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex.** Cell, 175(3), 736–750.e30. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.08.066>

## Theory

Usrey, W. M., & Sherman, S. M. (2019). **Corticofugal circuits: Communication lines from the cortex to the rest of the brain.** Journal of Comparative Neurology, 527(3), 640–650. <https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.24423>

Whittington, J. C. R., Muller, T. H., Mark, S., Chen, G., Barry, C., Burgess, N., & Behrens, T. E. J. (2020). **The Tolman-Eichenbaum machine: Unifying space and relational memory through generalization in the hippocampal formation.** Cell, 183(5), 1249–1263. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.024>

Rao, R. P. N. (2022). **A sensory-motor theory of the neocortex based on active predictive coding.** bioRxiv. <https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.30.522267>

Suzuki, M., Pennartz, C. M. A., & Aru, J. (2023). **How deep is the brain? The shallow brain hypothesis.** Nature Reviews Neuroscience. <https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00756-z>

## Our Papers

Hawkins, J., & Ahmad, S. (2016). **Why neurons have thousands of synapses: A theory of sequence memory in neocortex.** Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 10, Article 23. <https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2016.00023>

Hawkins, J., Ahmad, S., & Cui, Y. (2017). **A theory of how columns in the neocortex enable learning the structure of the world.** Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 11, Article 81. <https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2017.00081>

Ahmad, S., & Scheinkman, L. (2019). **How can we be so dense? The benefits of using highly sparse representations.** arXiv. <https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.11257>

Hawkins, J., Lewis, M., Klukas, M., Purdy, S., & Ahmad, S. (2019). **A framework for intelligence and cortical function based on grid cells in the neocortex.** Frontiers in Neural Circuits, 12, Article 121. <https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2018.00121>

Hole, K. J., & Ahmad, S. (2021). **A thousand brains: Toward biologically constrained AI**. SN Applied Sciences, 3(8), 743. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s42452-021-04715-0>

Clay, V., Leadholm, N., & Hawkins, J. (2024). **The Thousand Brains Project: A New Paradigm for Sensorimotor Intelligence.** arXiv. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18354#>

Leadholm, N., Clay, V., Knudstrup, S., Lee, H., & Hawkins, J. (2026). **Thousand-Brains Systems: Sensorimotor Intelligence for Rapid, Robust Learning and Inference.** Neural Computation, 38(6), 845–896. <https://doi.org/10.1162/NECO.a.1508>

> 📘
> You can read the [Thousand-Brains Systems Plain Language Explainer](https://thousandbrains.org/thousand-brain-systems-sensorimotor-intelligence-for-rapid-robust-learning-and-inference-a-plain-language-explainer/) for a less technical overview of the concepts in the above paper.

Hawkins, J., Leadholm, N., Clay, V. (2025) **Hierarchy or Heterarchy? A Theory of Long-Range Connections for the Sensorimotor Brain** arXiv. <https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05888>

> 📘
> You can read the [Hierarchy or Heterarchy Plain Language Explainer](https://thousandbrains.org/hierarchy-or-heterarchy-a-theory-of-long-range-connections-for-the-sensorimotor-brain-a-plain-language-explainer/) for a less technical overview of the concepts in the above paper.

# Other Resources

## Videos

As we are working on the neuroscience theory, we are publishing recordings of those meetings on [our YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@thousandbrainsproject/videos). Those videos contain our most up-to-date thinking and the questions we are struggling with on a day-to-day basis. If you are curious in the neuroscience behind this project, you can have a look at your [brainstorming](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTy9KIUvAj4\&list=PLXpTU6oIscrkYkv1qoN5Ctod9qr7NbgKg) and [review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPLQaGPK24k\&list=PLXpTU6oIscrkY-n0p2ulFeZJFBVpOSf4J) video series. For a short introduction to the project you can have a look at our [quick-start series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbqZHVlK4sE\&list=PLXpTU6oIscrn5ImFcRJQ3ameHbMWNd9Df) and for a longer overview of key aspects of the project our [core video series](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pody7qWszHg\&list=PLXpTU6oIscrlEoV5pOaX5Swnow-xO9xwk\&pp=0gcJCV8EOCosWNin).

Below is a great introductory video of Jeff Hawkins presenting an overview of our neuroscience theory.

[block:embed]
{
  "html": "<iframe class=\"embedly-embed\" src=\"//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FowRC8sLSb64%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DowRC8sLSb64&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FowRC8sLSb64%2Fhqdefault.jpg&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube\" width=\"854\" height=\"480\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"YouTube embed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture;\" allowfullscreen=\"true\"></iframe>",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owRC8sLSb64",
  "title": "2025/02 - Cortical Circuit Overview",
  "favicon": "https://www.youtube.com/favicon.ico",
  "image": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/owRC8sLSb64/hqdefault.jpg",
  "provider": "https://www.youtube.com/",
  "href": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owRC8sLSb64",
  "typeOfEmbed": "youtube"
}
[/block]

<style>
.contribution-button {
    border-radius: 5px;
    background-color: #EFEFEF;
    padding-left: 10px;
    padding-right: 10px;
    padding-top: 5px;
    padding-bottom: 5px;
    color: black;
    weight: bolder;
    display: inline-flex;
    margin-top: -10px;
    align-items: center;
    border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;
    text-decoration: none !important;
}
.contribution-button:hover {
    background-color: #DDDDDD;
    cursor: pointer;
    color: black;
}
</style>

<br><br>

***

#### Help Us Make This Page Better

All our docs are open-source. If something is wrong or unclear, submit a PR to fix it!

<a class="contribution-button" href="https://github.com/thousandbrainsproject/tbp.monty/edit/main/docs/overview/further-reading.md" target="_blank">Make a Contribution</a>

[Learn how to contribute to our docs](/docs/documentation)