Jeff Hawkins on Firing Up the Silicon Brain

Jeff Hawkins recently re-read his 2004 book On Intelligence, where the founder of Palm computing – the company that gave us the first handheld computer and later, first-generation smartphones – explains how the human brain learns. An electrical engineer by training, Hawkins had taken a deep interest in how the brain works and founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization focused on understanding how the neocortex processes information, at UC Berkeley in 2002. "There was very little I would change about that book," Hawkins says. "There's a lot I would add. There's a ton of stuff where I know exactly how it works, that I didn't know when I wrote it."