On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins Buy at: Amazon

Someone tackling the big questions: how brains work.

I've read stack loads of books on how bits of the mind hang together, but I don't think I've read one that tries to stick a flag in the ground and say what the organizing principles are. That's what On Intelligence does. The key, according to Hawkins, is that the properties of mammalian memory leads to a brain that spends its time predicting what's about to happen at many levels.

The details of this are fleshed out in a tough chapter on "How the cortex works". Did I full understand that chapter? Heck no - and read it through once, and it'd take a couple more sessions reading the details to take all of that chapter in and the role of the various brain regions and the connectivity between them. And of course all the answer's aren't in there, as it's a work in progress (that's ongoing at onintelligence.org) but it's exciting that someone has said "here's how it works, let's see where that takes us".

The chapters leading up to the big one on the cortex give a clear and readable picture of Hawkin's take on the history of artificial intelligence and the basic workings of memory. If you're interested in this area, it's a book worth having.

Yes, the author is that Jeff Hawkins, the one who created the PalmPilot.

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