Aah, true, and therein lies the rub. I definitely think the structure and function of cortical columns as described by Numenta is getting close to the mark on a

Aah, true, and therein lies the rub. I definitely think the structure and function of cortical columns as described by Numenta is getting close to the mark on a part of it. It seems to me like Transformer models are doing something very similar to this, where each attention head is roughly analogous to a cortical column. You can't build a mind on prediction alone, though (or can you?) so we need helper structures like the hippocampus.