"At around <a href=""https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCdV6BMMpOo&amp;t=1h09m00s"">1:09:00</a> he says the actual working of the brain is unknown. One excelent proposed explanation is the Thousand Brains Theory of Jeff Hawkins", that by the way was already in this podcast. It has to do with the modular architecture of the neocortex and how it is able to build a hierarchy of abstraction, thus modeling the world and ultimately the self, and much more (sparse distributed reoresentations, predictive coding, etc.)