Jeff Hawkins, in a talk he gave at TED in 2003, offers "a recipe for brain theory" and how it relates to AI.
I'll just let TED speak for Jeff for a moment:
To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think.
Jeff takes something Francis Crick said in a September 1979
Scientific American article (to paraphrase, "We don't know squat about brains. We lack a framework to interpret the scads of data we have.") and runs with it.
He defines intelligence and then talks about his brain theory:
Jeff Hawkins: How brain science will change computing | TED Talk
He's a compsci guy and I don't want to mangle his ideas. It might be best to take a gander for yourselves (that link is a 20 minute video).
Caveat: It very well may be that since 2003 somebody picked up the gauntlet Jeff threw down. I dunno. I'd have to go take a look around to find out.
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