New Guy in the Ivory Tower
Creative ideas about how the brain works put forth by grad school dropout Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm hand-held computer, have won the ungrudging respect of neuroscientists. The ivory tower may be edging down its old, forbidding guard. If so, science could gain in practicality, a quality it needs more of.
Wealthy donors often want to influence what they fund, and researchers have to pay respect while preserving independence. But Hawkins is a rich guy who is actually being welcomed. Last year, for example, he was appointed to the board of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, and its elite researchers are testing his theories by experimenting with rats.
Hawkins is discussing a collaboration with Caltech, where cognitive and behavioral biology professor Christof Koch calls Hawkins’ theories about how memory and intelligence work “eminently reasonable,” and adds, “His ideas might still be wrong, but they are also highly plausible.”
Given Hawkins’ fat money bags--his stake in the Palm-spinoff company Handspring alone is worth $215 million--it’s possible that some academics are flattering him to get funding. But the tall 44-year-old’s enthusiasm for neuroscience is genuine. Hawkins believes that the Palm, by matching its user’s scrawled letters with its own memory of the spare lines and shapes of its simplified alphabet, works like a very primitive brain. Consciousness, Hawkins believes, arises from pattern recognition--the constant comparing of data sent by our optical, spinal and auditory nerves with memories stored in our brain. As he puts it, “Intelligence is an internal measure of sensory prediction, not an external measure of behavior: When you look at my face, your eyes don’t just go randomly around. They look at very specific things.”
In a sense, Hawkins turns science upside down by starting with a practical application and turning that into theory. But he knows not to take the brain-computer analogy too far. He’s quick to note there are fundamental differences, like the fact that today’s most sophisticated computers cannot begin to equal the complex neural networking of the brain.
Hawkins enrolled in a doctoral program in neurobiology at UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. He dropped out in frustration at the slow-moving, hierarchical bureaucracy. His return to academia as a powerful businessman could give science a dose of the energy and impatience that made him a rich inventor.
