HOUSE OVERSIGHT 026417 Gorillas can crawl after 2 months, and build their own nests after 2.5 years. They leave their mothers at 3-4 years. Human children are pretty much useless during the first 10-12 years, but during each phase, their brains have the opportunity to encounter many times as much training data as a gorilla brain. Humans are literally smarter on every level, and because the abilities of the higher levels depend on those of the lower levels, they can perform abstractions that mature gorillas will never learn, no matter how much we try to train them. The second set of mechanisms is in the motivational system. Motivation tells the brain what to pay attention to, by giving reward and punishment. If a brain does not get much reward for solving puzzles, the individual will find mathematics very boring and won't learn much of it. If a brain gets lots of rewards for discovering other people's intentions, it will learn a lot of social cognition. Language might be the result of three things that are different in humans: - extended training periods per layer (after the respective layer is done, it is difficult to learn a new set of phonemes or the first language) - more layers - different internal rewards. Perhaps the reward for learning grammatical structure is the same that makes us like music. Our brains may enjoy learning compositional regular structure, and they enjoy making themselves understood, and everything else is something the universal cortical learning figures out on its own. This is a hypothesis that is shared by a growing number of people these days. In humans, it is reflected for instance by the fact that races with faster motor development have lower IQ. (In individuals of the same group, slower development often indicates defects, of course.) Another support comes from machine learning: we find that the same learning functions can learn visual and auditory pattern recognition, and even end-to-end-learning. Google has bu