Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing, Part 1

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/lang/eng/jeff_hawkins_on_how_brain_science_will_change_computing.html I do two things. I design mobile computers and I study brains. And today's talk is about brains and, yay, somewhere I have a brain fan out there. (Laughter) I'm going to, if I can have my first slide up here, and you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations. So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory, why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it. And I'll try to do all that in 20 minutes. I have two affiliations. Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, and we study theoretical neuroscience, and we study how the neocortex works. I'm going to talk all about that. I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's the slide here. These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years, starting back from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on, and ending up most recently with the Treo, and we're continuing to do this. And I've done this because I really believe that mobile computing is the future of personal computing, and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things. But this was, I have to admit, all an accident. I really didn't want to do any of these products and very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry. And before I tell you about that, I just have to tell you this one little picture of graffiti there I picked off the web the other day. I was looking for a picture of graffiti, little text input language, and I found the website dedicated to teachers who want to make these, you know, the script writing things across the top of their blackboard, and they had added graffiti to it, and I'm sorry about that. So what happened was, when I was young and got out of engineering school, Cornell in '79, I decided, I went to work for Intel. I was in the computer industry, and three months into that, I fell in love with something else, and I said, "I made the wrong career choice here," and I fell in love with brains. This is not a real brain. This is a picture of one, a line drawing. But I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind. In September 1979, Scientific American came out with a single topic issue about the brain. And it was quite good. It was one of the best issues ever. And they talked about the neuron and development and disease and vision and all the things you might want to know about brains. It was really quite impressive. And one might have the impression that we really knew a lot about brains. But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame. Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. And he wrote a story basically saying, well, this is all well and good, but you know what, we don't know diddley squat about brains and no one has a clue how these things work, so don't believe what anyone tells you. This is a quote from that article. He said, "What is conspicuously lacking," he's a very proper British gentleman so, "What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches." I thought the word framework was great. He didn't say we didn't even have a theory. He says, we don't even know how to begin to think about it -- we don't even have a framework. We are in the pre-paradigm days if you want to use Thomas Kuhn. And so I fell in love with this, and said look, we have all this knowledge about brains. How hard can it be? And this is something we can work on my lifetime. I felt I could make a difference, and so I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business. First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there, and I said, well, I want to build intelligent machines, too, but the way I want to do it is to study how brains work first. And they said, oh, you don't need to do that. We're just going to program computers, that's all we need to do. And I said, no, you really ought to study brains. They said, oh, you know, you're wrong. And I said, no, you're wrong, and I didn't get in. But I was a little disappointed -- pretty young, but I went back again a few years later and this time was in California, and I went to Berkeley. And I said, I'll go in from the biological side. So I got in -- in the PhD program in Biophysics, and I was, all right, I'm studying brains now, and I said, well, I want to study theory. And they said, oh no, you can't study theory about brains. That's not something you do. You can't get funded for that. And as a graduate student, you can't do that. So I said, oh my gosh. I was very depressed. I said, but I can make a difference in this field. So what I did is I went back in the computer industry and said, well, I'll have to work here for a while, do something. That's when I designed all those computer products. And I said, I want to do this for four years, make some money, like I was having a family, and I would mature a bit, and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit. Well, it took longer than four years. It's been about 16 years. But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it. So why should we have a good brain theory? Well, there's lots of reasons people do science. One is -- the most basic one -- is people like to know things. We're curious, and we just go out and get knowledge, you know? Why do we study ants? Well, it's interesting. Maybe we'll learn something really useful about it, but it's interesting and fascinating. But sometimes, a science has some other attributes which makes it really, really interesting. Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves, it'll tell us who we are. Rarely, you know, evolution did this and Copernicus did this, where we have a new understanding of who we are. And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain. Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are. Another thing is sometimes science leads to really big societal benefits and technologies, or businesses, or whatever, that come out of it. And this is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we're going to be able to build intelligent machines, and I think that's actually a good thing on the whole, and it's going to have tremendous benefits to society just like a fundamental technology. Source: TED.com