The world, and countless generations of interactions with it, coaxed our brains to evolve in the unique way that humans perceive reality. And yet, thanks to the past century's developments in cognitive science and now artificial intelligence, we have entrenched a view of the brain that doesn't spend much time on this dynamic. Instead, most of us tend to see our brains as a "network" made of undifferentiated brain cells. These neurons produce cognition by the patterns in which groups of them fire at once — a model that has inspired advanced computers and AI.
But accumulating discoveries of different specialized brain cells pose a challenge to models of human or artificial intelligence in which thoughts and concepts arise purely from the distributed firing of many essentially-identical brain cells in a network. Perhaps it's time to consider that if we want to replicate human intelligence, we ought to take a closer look at some of the amazing adaptations that have evolved in mammalian neurons — and specifically, neurons in the human brain. Instead of the popularly understood idea of the brain as a neural network of undifferentiated brain cells, research has increasingly found that different neurons, even of the same basic type, have their own specific functions and abilities.
