Growing new connections in your brain is more essential to learning than strengthening established connections. You may know how to be a tax lawyer because you've spent years strengthening your old tax law connections, but these are utterly useless when you take up ballroom dancing to find yourself a mate.
Numenta website: http://numenta.com/
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http://www.science20.com/physics_foundations/blog/numenta_the_bruce_lee_of_ai_and_deep_learning-154801