View on Amazon Study modeFoundationsExpand all01What is the central thesis of Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence?02Why did brains evolve at all, on Bennett's account?03What evolutionary backdrop made the first nervous systems valuable?04Why does Bennett think brain evolution should inform AI design?Breakthrough 1 — SteeringExpand all01When and in which animals did Breakthrough #1 (steering) appear?02What is the two-rule logic the first bilaterians used to navigate?03Define valence and arousal in Bennett's framework.04Name the four affect quadrants Bennett derives from valence × arousal.05What different roles do dopamine and serotonin play in steering brains?06Why does Bennett describe chronic stress as energy-saving?07What is associative learning, and why is it specifically a steering-era innovation?Breakthrough 2 — ReinforcingExpand all01When and in which animals did Breakthrough #2 (reinforcing) appear?02What is the credit-assignment problem that reinforcement learning solves?03What is temporal-difference learning, and what brain structure implements it?04How was dopamine repurposed in the reinforcing breakthrough?05What new psychological states emerge with reinforcement learning?06What is curiosity, in neural terms?07What are place cells, and why does Bennett call them the "first model of the world"?08What is Bennett's "Cambrian runaway" loop?Breakthrough 3 — SimulatingExpand all01When and in which animals did Breakthrough #3 (simulating) appear?02What is special about the neocortex's architecture?03What does Bennett mean by saying the cortex implements generative models?04What is vicarious trial and error?05What is the rat-versus-fish glass-barrier experiment, and what does it show?06What does the agranular prefrontal cortex (aPFC) do?07Why mammals, and not, say, reptiles or fish?Breakthrough 4 — MentalizingExpand all01When and in which animals did Breakthrough #4 (mentalizing) appear?02What is theory of mind?03What is the granular prefrontal cortex (gPFC)?04What is the frugivory hypothesis for primate intelligence?05What do mirror neurons do, on Bennett's account?06How does mentalizing transform planning?07What is Bennett's "levels of explanation" hierarchy across the breakthroughs?Breakthrough 5 — SpeakingExpand all01When and in which species did Breakthrough #5 (speaking) emerge?02What is the "no new structure" puzzle of human language?03What two infant instincts are language-enabling and absent in chimps?04Why does Bennett call language a curriculum rather than an organ?05What is cumulative cultural evolution, and what does language unlock?06What is Bennett's gossip → punishment → altruism feedback loop?07What does Bennett claim about the universality of moral instincts?Breakthroughs and AIExpand all01How does Bennett map his five breakthroughs to milestones in AI?02Why does Bennett see LLMs as a candidate "breakthrough #6"?03What is the analogy between CNN translational invariance and evolved priors?04How does Bennett's framework reframe Aschenbrenner's AGI timeline?05How does Bennett's framework reframe Bostrom's alignment problem?06What is Bennett's most counterintuitive claim about AI?