Sheehan brings fresh ideas to the stagnating discussion of memes by modeling them, and indeed all learned patterns, as overlapping neural connection hierarchies. The hierarchies automatically result from the very simple Hebbian learning algorithm - neurons that fire together wire together. Sheehan's model is nearly identical to the cortical architecture proposed by Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence, with the added recognition that a given meme maps directly to a single hierarchy. After describing exactly what a meme is and how it becomes neuronally encoded, Sheehan then shows how a metric of similarity between any two learned patterns is automatically expressed by the degree to which their hierarchies overlap. This simple mechanism easily enables abstract induction, which, for cognitive scientists, is tantamount to finding the Holy Grail.

The inductive mechanism of overlapping hierarchies further enables a deductive process of combining learned patterns of causality on the basis of similarities among their abstract interfaces. Creative thinking is thus mechanistically reduced to a Darwinian process of neural firing patterns rapidly evolving - probing and evaluating various combinations of learned causality, all within an environment of simulated reality (imagination) encoded by the neural hierarchies.

The book shows how such a simple architecture amazingly achieves abstract complexity and creativity through mere redundancy, and how all aspects of human cognition, including even qualia, are reduced to mere beliefs, encoded by the hierarchically structured cortex.

Sheehan's coherent theory on how the mechanistic brain produces the creative and emotional mind leads him directly to a startlingly obvious explanation of how and why the constants of our universe were so exquisitely tuned, by an evolutionary process, so as to enable the emergence of intelligent life. The book contains not just one, but several, hugely important ideas that span the domains of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy and cosmology. The `consilient' ideas are sure to spark a great deal of controversy when they are widely understood.