Notes on Chapter 8: The Tools of Thought

I found this chapter to one of the longer and more difficult to comprehend chapters in the book.  The basic ideas were intriguing, in particular:

• Memories are hierarchical.
• Recognition is a multi-stage, temporal process.
• Brains are naturally amenable to grammar like organization.

A basic concept used throughout the book is that larger brains lead to new abilities, even though the larger brain is just "more of the same" in that a larger brain does not have new or different structures, just larger versions of the same thing.

Thus, if memories are hierarchical, then a larger brain means more categories and deeper hierarchies.  If recognition is multi-stage, then a bigger brain can mean more stages and a finer distinction between otherwise identical items.  If brains and thought uses a grammar like structure, then a larger brain could mean a more elaborate grammar.

I find the notion of the "scavenger hunt" model for memory especially interesting.  While that approach seems especially strange, it does dovetail nicely with the associative nature of the brain: each "step" in a memory is an association.  Each association can be reused in different memories because they have a certain "momentum:" a memory is the sum of what came before plus the next association.