[membrain]

this hypothesis is around since at least the 70s (Vernon Mountcastle' paper on cortical similarities), recently (2004) hawkins also published a book in which he promoted the same idea, on which he is currently working with his AGI company numenta.

to be honest, it sounds really great and it could even be the case that there is a very general underlying principle to cortical information processing and pattern recognition. But one should be careful not to mix solid scientific hypotheses with mainstream media hysteria and people who try to grab attention with their simplifications, claiming today that entropy maximization is the underlying principle and changing to sparse coding tomorrow. We are not that far and what we need is solid research instead of over-the-head assumptions and claims "to have solved the riddle" (in that respect, it might not be that far off alchemy :P)