Jeff Hawkins

Hawkins came to neuroscience the way builders come to things: not to study the phenomenon but to understand it well enough to make something of equal quality. In 1979, when he read a special issue of Scientific American devoted to the brain, he finished it convinced that understanding the neocortex was the most important scientific problem of the age, and that no one was approaching it correctly. The field was cartographic—mapping which regions did what—when what was needed was a theory of the mechanism: what principle could explain how a sheet of nervous tissue gives rise to perception, language, and thought. The institutions turned him away. The MIT AI Laboratory told him the brain was irrelevant to building intelligent machines. Berkeley offered no path to the thesis he wanted to write. So Hawkins did what engineers do: he solved an intermediate problem first. He invented the Palm Pilot and the Treo, made enough money to fund