Back in the Dileep George days Numenta sought mathematical support for their theory in a Bayesian approach à la Judea Pearl. But I don't think they ever had any

Back in the Dileep George days Numenta sought mathematical support for their theory in a Bayesian approach à la Judea Pearl. But I don't think they ever had any illusions that the brain explicitly performs statistical calculations. Hawkins et al. at Numenta are now embracing the theory of sparse distributed representation, developing upon the work of Pentti Kanerva as a formal foundation. It's biologically much more plausible, but technologically less feasible (with the current hardware paradigm). I suspect Dileep George in the end was more eager to put the theory into use.