Palmistry

Open access, freely available online I s Michael Moore liberal America's Rush Limbaugh? If so, is he fi lling a much needed, or a much lamented, gap in turning issues that are really cast in pastel shades into Day-Glo relief? In this hale monograph, Jeff Hawkins (rendered by Sandra Blakeslee) plays exactly this role for theoretical neuroscience. As a pastel practitioner myself, but furtively sharing many of Hawkins' prejudices and hunches about computational modelling in neuroscience, I am caught between commendation and consternation. Hawkins is an engineer, entrepreneur, and scientist who founded and led the companies Palm and then Handspring. He created, against what must have been considerable obstacles, the fi rst widely successful PDA, and continued the development of this platform. He has thus amply earned a bully pulpit. The autobiographical segments of this book detail that, throughout his career, he has been interested in understanding how the brain works, using his substantial knowledge and intuition about the architecture and design of conventional computers as a counterpoint. More recently, Hawkins has generously put his money where his ideas about mentation dictate, founding the Redwood Neuroscience Institute and also funding various conferences and workshops. The institute is dedicated to 'studying and promoting biologically accurate mathematical models of memory and cognition.' Despite its youth, the Institute already has attracted notable attention as a centre for theoretical neuroscience. Hawkins' quest, and— depending on which statements of the book you read—its endpoint ('... a comprehensive theory of how the brain works ... describ[ing] what intelligence is and how your brain creates it') or just its tipping point ('join me, along with others who take up the challenge'), are the subject here. There are really three books jostling inside the covers. One is the (highly abbreviated) autobiography. The history of modern computing is very brief and (at least judging by the sales) very glorious, and this story is most entertaining. Don't miss the wonderfully faux naive letter from Hawkins to Gordon Moore asking, in 1980, to set up a research group within Intel devoted to the brain. That Hawkins prospered in clear opposition to accepted wisdom is perhaps one of the key subtexts of the book. The second, and rather less satisfying, book is about the philosophy of mind and the history of artifi cial intelligence and neural network approaches to understanding the brain and replicating cognition. With respect to the fi elds of …