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YouTube Video - Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing

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I have always been fascinated with the brain ever since I learned that it’s responsible for much more than you think. I remember being amused while learning about the ancient Egyptians who regarded the heart as the commander in chief of the human body. Then again, what do I know? History keeps telling us that we are probably wrong. At least no one gets killed anymore for their ideas. I can only speak for westernized countries.In the video above, there is a man everyone should know about. His name is Jeff Hawkins, and you may or may not know him as the co-founder of the Palm. He became quite wealthy with that company making small hand-held computers. Now, he’s shifted all of his focus into understanding the brain and creating practical applications out of this understanding.I remember the first time I found out about him in a magazine article. Here was a guy with lots of money, which I think may be in the billions. He had this underlying passion, and now he is committing to it whole heartily. He’s also pretty darn smart. Google him if you want to know more.

My passion is to create practical applications for education. I know that I need take other people’s understanding of how the brain works to create something really ground breaking. The question is why.

I think the best way to answer this question is to imagine an ideal educational environment. I am picturing an extremely smart person. However, he is not the student. He is a mentor. He is a personal mentor that helps guide the student to maximize his or her potential. The student also has access to any tool that exists on earth to help the student by actually doing and creating. This helps solidify theory and teach the student how the theory translates into real world impact. This mentor has a working knowledge of everything, or it could be many mentors who are experts at their specific field.

The problem is that such a scenario would only work if student belonged to a very wealthy family and had parents who considered it a good idea to invest so much in their child’s education. However, I beg the question. Can we somehow create this ideal within a virtual environment? What would we need?

We’d something that would emulate the mentor. The mentor is a human being, which is flexible and adaptive. A human being who can recognize a child’s unique situation and act accordingly. If we could just somehow model the mentor virtually…

This is where research like that of Jeff Hawkins comes in. He mentions in the video that the first applications are not trying to replicate a human being. This would entail much more of an understanding of how our outer cortex interacts with our more primitive parts of the brain. However, we can still start by emulating what we deem makes us intelligent without all the survival mechanisms that help us avoid tigers and angry mothers.

According to Jeff Hawkins, there hasn’t been a theory or framework that makes sense of all the data these biologists, neuroscientists, and other scientists have collected. Jeff thinks there must be a theory or framework before we can start trying to make sense of the data. With his work so far, he believes it comes down to our ability to make predictions.

He is already creating real applications that can go into cars that will be able to predict if someone is in a dangerous situation. His brain machine can potentially create learning software that will able to quickly understand what level a child is at and start teaching the child with continuous interactivity. The possibilities are endless.

I have only scratched the surface of how we can apply new research into creating better learning tools. If you can’t already tell, this is something I am very interested in, so you will likely to see many future posts about this topic. They will probably be much more specific.

Anyway, let me know what you think and have a great day!

Carl Zetterlund

P.S. I find those TED Talks strangely addicting. Hearing the leading thinkers of the world talk is quite amazing. To think if I was born decades ago, I may have never been able to experience so many great thinkers while sitting comfortably on my bed.

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