Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence describes Mountcastle's 1978 article An organizing principle.. as "the rosetta stone of neuroscience".

For anybody who hasn't, I strongly suggest reading On Intelligence, even if you don't agree with all his views. Hawkins does a fantastic job presenting his framework in an understandable way, and once you finish reading it, you definitely feel like you could code up some simations yourself.

If you have read the book, and are interested in tracking his progress, check out Numenta. They released a product based on his hierarchical temporal memory. There's a spinoff company named Vicarious with Dileep George, one of the minds behind the HTM implementation, but they've been pretty hush-hush about their progress.

They've actually tried to make themselves much more visible recently. Search for NuPIC.

Here is an interesting talk by Jeff Hawkins - http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_w...

sidenote: this is from 2003; conclusion mentionning intelligent system will appear as non robotic ones but as smart cars for instance. Quite fitting.

On the first page of the book there is a cross above the M in the coauthor's name. What is that? I've seen similar markings in library books in college. Is it something librarians used before everything went digital?

Sorry for the off topic question.

Thanks, insightful.