It’s no surprise that Jeff Hawkins ’79 EE, inventor of the PalmPilot, is passionate about mobile computing. But he’s also crazy about brains.
by Beth Saulnier
JEFF Hawkins takes the podium at the New York Academy of Sciences, where dozens of extremely smart people have packed the house on a weeknight in early February to hear him speak about the fundamental nature of intelligence. He’s come armed with some visual aids: a PowerPoint presentation, a blue cloth napkin—to depict the surface area of the neocortex—and a classic anatomical sculpture. “This looks like a brain model,” he says, holding up the grapefruit-sized item with a smile, “but it’s actually the best way of getting stopped by airport security.” His audience offers a collective chuckle; clearly, Hawkins is no dry academic.
He isn’t, in fact, an academic at all. The 1979 electrical engineering grad is an entrepreneur: inventor of the Palm Pilot, founder of Palm Computing and Handspring, and creator of the Treo line of smart phones.
But Hawkins is much more than an engineer and businessman; he’s what an earlier age might have called a gentleman scholar. Grown wealthy through his business ventures, the Silicon Valley phenom has chosen not to retire to some South Pacific island but to use his resources to study a subject that has fascinated him most of his life. As Hawkins himself puts it in the third paragraph of his recent book: “I am crazy about brains.” But though Hawkins may not have a Ph.D. in neuroscience, he’s nobody’s idea of a dilettante. He’s been studying the subject for decades and has gained the respect of his be-robed peers. “I’m not a complete outsider,” he says. “If you spoke to anyone who knows me, they would likely say I’m an expert in neuroscience. I’m not an academic in the sense that I don’t make a career out of it—I don’t apply for grants or worry about tenure—but my science is respected.”
While his passion for all things neurobiological has been simmering since he was a teenager, it wasn’t until a few years ago that Hawkins jumped into the deep end of the pool. In 2002, he founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI) in Menlo Park, California, a research center where he and eight full-time scientists explore how the brain works. “It’s the most important question facing humanity,” he says. “Every other human endeavor is dependent on it. What does it mean to understand something? How do we do what we do? How come humans have taken over this planet? It’s all because of the brain. I like to say it’s the last great terrestrial frontier of science.” Furthermore, he notes, it’s a topic with powerful implications for every man, woman, and child. “Most of the big questions of science have to do with things that aren’t very here-and-now,” he says. “‘How did the universe begin and how is it going to end? How do things work at the nano scale?’ But everyone’s got a brain. It’s who we are.”
Hawkins compares the effort to understand the fundamental nature of intelligence to another puzzle, one that transfixed great minds centuries ago: the truth about how the solar system is structured. “The smartest people in the world couldn’t figure out what was going on up in the sky, and they were trying for decades.” he says. “The answer wasn’t very hard—but it was hard to figure out, because it wasn’t intuitive. That’s one of the characteristics of big unsolved problems in science.”
As Hawkins himself happily admits, he is a man on a mission. He wants both scientists and laypeople to get excited about figuring out what’s going on between their ears. “In an understated way, he’s a compelling visionary,” says Ramin Zabih, a Cornell computer science professor who has visited RNI. “You can see how he’s succeeded in his commercial ventures. He has a gift for conveying enthusiasm about what he’s interested in. He’s a big-picture thinker.” Or, as Nobel laureate James Watson said when he introduced Hawkins before a talk at The Juilliard School in February: “He has changed the lives of many people—and I have a feeling he’s going to change the lives of many neuroscientists who don’t yet think like him.”
In an effort to spread the word about his theories, Hawkins has written On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines, published in October by Times Books. Co-authored with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee (but written in the first person), the book offers a detailed account of Hawkins’s take on how we learn. The reviews have been, well, fantastic. “I couldn’t put it down,” says Cornell president Jeffrey Lehman, a fan of Hawkins’s work. “I was swept along from page to page. It’s an important book, because it offers a theory of what the brain is about and a set of testable implications about that theory, and does it in a way that’s really accessible.”
Though On Intelligence does contain its share of technical jargon—in his talks, Hawkins good-naturedly warns non-scientists to take a deep breath before plunging into Chapter Six: “How the Cortex Works”—he intended it for a broad audience. He’s especially interested in sparking a fire in young people, “students who haven’t decided what they wanted to do in life.” “It’s an interdisciplinary book,” he says. “I’m trying to create a movement in the sense that artificial intelligence and neural networks had movements. They had their day, where for a number of years there were thousands of people working in these fields—companies that got started, degree programs, and so on. I’m trying to do the same for the correct view of how brains work.”
So what is Hawkins’s theory? In a nutshell, it’s all about memory and prediction, how we form memories and how we use those memories to predict the future. As Hawkins describes it, the human brain stores knowledge in a layered hierarchy: at the top is new information, while way at the bottom are tasks and facts that have become so well-learned as to be second nature. As humans learn, we’re constantly taking in new information, comparing it to what we already know, and using that knowledge to predict the immediate future. “When you’re learning to drive, the process of changing lanes requires all of your concentration, and you’re intensely focused on what your hands and eyes are doing,” says Lehman, recalling one of Hawkins’s typical examples. “But when you’ve been driving for years, you can go for half an hour and suddenly realize you have no idea what you did—although you passed cars, changed lanes, and got off at an exit—because these very complex processes have been pushed down below the level where they’re occupying all your conscious energy.”
The power of prediction also plays an important role in Hawkins’s premise: each time you take a step, he notes, you anticipate what a footfall will feel like. Similarly, as he demonstrated in the science academy talk, once you learn to clap your hands, you don’t think about it anymore; your brain has learned expectations about what clapping entails. “I expected my hands would stop and not go through each other,” he told the audience. “I expected they wouldn’t turn into potatoes. They’d make a specific sound”—he clapped again to demonstrate—“and not squeal like a pig.” But when something unexpected does happen—you’re zipping along the highway, say, and a car suddenly cuts you off—your brain jumps back up to that top level of awareness and information gathering. “His core model, which depicts the brain as this wonderful recursive prediction machine that’s constantly anticipating what information will come into it, fits in a very intuitive way with my own experience of both learning and teaching,” says Lehman, a legal scholar. “It offers a picture of how an experience that we all know—having things that were once difficult become second nature—could actually map onto the physical structure of the brain.”
Another basic tenet of Hawkins’s theory is that the brain is not a static organ: it functions across time. In his book, he asks readers to imagine their homes, recalling various details. What does the front door look like? What items do you keep in your shower? “You might say these things are all part of the memory of your home,” he writes. “But you can’t think of them all at once. They are obviously related memories but there is no way you can bring to mind all of this detail at once. You have a thorough memory of your home; but to recall it you have to go through it in sequential segments, in much the same way as you experience it.”
Because of this sequential nature, Hawkins often illustrates his theories by citing how people learn and recall music—hence the invitation to speak at Juilliard. “We store the memory of the music’s intervals, not the actual notes,” he told his audience, after humming a few bars of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. “Music can only exist in time.” Hawkins himself is often immersed in music—not only as a longtime devotee, but also as the father of two teenage girls. “Why do we like music?” he muses, standing on the Juilliard stage in front of a huge set of organ pipes and a Steinway concert grand. “The brain likes to discover patterns in the world. It’s pleasurable for us. And music is a pure pattern fix—it’s like a drug for the brain.”
Although Hawkins is interested in how the entire brain works, he has focused his energy on the neocortex—evolutionarily, the newest part of the brain, and the center of intelligence. Containing some 300 trillion synapses (the connections between neurons) the neocortex is a mass of scrunched-up, wavy matter that sits atop the evolutionarily ancient “old brain,” which governs such fundamental things as blood pressure, hunger, sex, and emotion. If spread out, the neocortex would be two millimeters thick and about a foot and a half square—roughly the dimensions of Hawkins’s trusty dinner napkin. “We have a very large neocortex,” he says, “and a very sophisticated model of the world.”
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This representation shows how the human brain uses and interprets sensory input to predict what it can’t see, in this case the portion of the cat hidden from view. |
Among the early readers of On Intelligence was Bob Constable, dean of the faculty of computing and information science at Cornell, who offered feedback during the writing process. Constable, who calls Hawkins “an incredibly smart guy,” notes that just as he has a knack for starting companies, he was able to see that there was a gaping hole in the field of neuroscience—that no one was trying to present a complete model of how the brain works. “The more you get to know him, the more you realize he has an interesting way of looking at the world,” Constable says of his friend. “He’s very candid and funny. He’s a disarming guy, an incredibly down-to-earth person. He sits there in his institute like everybody else, beavering away at the board, writing and thinking and talking.”
Cornell psychology professor David Field, an expert in computational neuroscience, spent an eight-month sabbatical in the Bay Area in 2003; his schedule included working one day a week with colleagues at RNI. (The institute is scheduled to relocate to the Berkeley campus this summer.) He describes Hawkins as having infectious enthusiasm and a no-nonsense approach. “You can see why his companies do well,” Field says. “He works very hard, and he expects the people around him to work hard too. You can get lost in details, but Jeff was someone who always wanted a bigger picture.”
Hawkins grew up on the North Shore of Long Island, in a family enamored of building things—boats in particular. Although he says he wasn’t a “science kid,” he was deeply curious and a voracious reader. At fifteen, he told his audience at the science academy, he drew up a list of four fundamental questions about the world. They went something like this:
1. Why does the universe exist?
2. Why does it have the laws that it does?
3. What is life and where did it come from?
4. What is intelligence?
In the interest of addressing Question Number Four, he did what he always did: went to the library and looked for a book on the subject. “As a teenager I had become accustomed to being able to find well-written books that explained almost any topic of interest,” he writes in On Intelligence. “There were books on relativity theory, black holes, magic, and mathematics—whatever I was fascinated with at the moment. Yet my search for a satisfying brain book turned up empty. I came to realize that no one had any idea how the brain actually worked. There weren’t even any bad or unproven theories; there simply were none.”
Fast-forward to September 1979 and the dawn of the microcomputer age. After graduating from Cornell, Hawkins had taken a job with Intel in Portland, Oregon. That month, Scientific American published a special issue dedicated to the brain—a volume that remains beloved among many neuroscientists of his generation. In addition to addressing such topics as brain organization, development, and chemistry, the issue included an essay by Francis Crick, James Watson’s partner in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. In the piece, entitled “Thinking About the Brain,” Crick noted that despite all the accumulated knowledge about the organ, its workings remained a profound mystery. For Hawkins, Crick’s piece was a “rallying call.”
“He was like the boy pointing to the emperor with no clothes,” Hawkins writes. “According to Crick, neuroscience was a lot of data without a theory. His exact words were, ‘what is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas.’ To me this was the British gentleman’s way of saying, ‘We don’t have a clue how this thing works.’ It was true then, and it’s still true today.”
While at Intel, Hawkins tried to convince his bosses that a greater understanding of the brain could lead to the development of better microprocessors; the company took a pass. After transferring to Intel’s Boston campus to be near his future wife, Hawkins decided to apply to MIT’s artificial intelligence lab, offering the same proposition. A.I. was all the rage—but its researchers were looking to surpass the human brain, not emulate it. Hawkins’s application was rejected.
Hawkins eventually relocated to Northern California, where he went to work for GRiD Systems, designer of the first laptop computer. Still compelled to study the brain, he quit his job and enrolled as a full-time grad student in Berkeley’s biophysics program. He studied there for two years in the mid-eighties, but left when his thesis proposal on neural pattern recognition was rejected—because there was no one on the faculty studying that topic, and therefore no one Hawkins could work under. (As Watson joked in his Juilliard introduction: “At Berkeley, he found out that his professors weren’t that bright.”) Hawkins returned to GRiD, becoming vice president for research and pioneering the GRiDPAD, the progenitor of the Palm Pilot. After licensing the technology, Hawkins founded Palm in January 1992.
Although Hawkins’s brain research wasn’t an active part of developing the Palm, it did play a role. In struggling to solve the problem of handwriting recognition—which so bedeviled Apple’s failed Newton—it occurred to him that human beings are happy to learn new tools, such as touch-typing, as long as they work as expected. “It was about predictability, not writing style,” he says. “If a tool is predictable then people will like it, even if you have to learn something new. But most people thought the idea of a new alphabet was really stupid.” The result of Hawkins’s stupid idea: Graffiti, the easy-to-master user interface that changed the way people manage their personal information.
In March, Hawkins announced his latest commercial venture: a company named Numenta, founded with longtime business partner Donna Dubinsky. Named after the Latin word for mind (“mentis”), the company will develop technology stemming from his neuroscience research. “It’s very difficult to know what the exact applications are going to be because we are working on a fundamental technology, but I am confident it’s going to be big business,” he says. “It’s like when they invented the microprocessor—no one anticipated the cell phone or the internet. I could try to tell you what it’s going to be used for, but I’d probably get it wrong.”
He does have a few example ideas, though. They include the possibility of a more accurate weather-prediction system, based on the concept that the planet’s system of weather sensors add up to a “big eyeball.” A computer that could process weather information like the brain processes visual input, he says, “would discover things like El Niño quicker than we would.” Another potential use would be in analyzing genes—taking advantage of the brain’s penchant for pattern recognition to sift through the genome and identify combinations that predict disease. In general, he says, his model of brain function holds promise for solving longstanding problems in computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
“He’s just bubbling with ideas and plans,” Constable says of Hawkins. “You know that when you meet him there’s going to be some new thing he tells you with a great twinkle in his eye. ‘What do you think of this? Isn’t this cool?’ And you know that he’ll have something remarkable to say—and that maybe he’s going to create a whole new industry. So when you see that twinkle in his eye you think, ‘Oh my God—what is he going to do now?’”
Beth Saulnier is a journalist and mystery author who lives in Manhattan. Her latest novel, an urban thriller called “See Isabelle Run,” came out in March 2005 under her married name, Elizabeth Bloom.
