Hawkins, the man who brought us the Palm Pilot, now brings us the brain. The way he serves it up here may as well have it on a silver platter. On Intelligence is written for the layperson, but contains all the information you need to make the theory go.

When you look at the great discoveries of humanity, those wonders which have transformed society and self have been the product of simple yet non-obvious schemes. The brain is like that. Hawkins led me through how my own nugget works, and as he did the "Ah HA!" moments just kept pouring out. The first pass through this book I read one chapter per night to let my own brain work on it while I slept. I'm convinced Hawkins is going to set off more than a scientific revolution here.

A nutshell explanation: Hawkins describes the neocortex as a series of tiered pattern processors. At base levels individual neurons fire in response to stimuli and their cumulative effects are considered by the next layer up. The process repeats in layers of defining and converging branches to abstracted meaning. Likewise, in the reverse process abstracted concept diverges into granular specificity and motor action. I've been toying with the basic ideas presented in the book via Max/MSP/Jitter, and the results are intriguing. Primitive implementations actually respond as you would expect based on Hawkins' descriptions. I'll be looking for ways to sit more refined versions of my patches in the creative flow. Finally, "playing with my machines" may come to mean more direct collaboration.

Based on my own successful experiments, the nature of the neocortex has profound implications for just about everything. Will this be the dawning of the Age of Pattern? Perhaps the trouble all along has been one of definition and conceptual boundaries. Once you know what to look for, intelligent processes seem to be all around us. So far, I've been unable to find intelligent activity I'm unable to explain using Hawkins' concepts. If intelligence is simply about the recognition, storage and prediction of patterns... won't it be amazing if persistence of state and upward scaling is all it takes to make a conscious being?