I seem to be working hard at digging down my non-fiction reading list lately. My most recent read being Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence". For those who don't know, Jeff Hawkins brought us both the Palm Pilot and the Handspring Treo; but it turns out that his first interest has always been thinking and brains.

"On Intelligence" is his treatise on how the human mind works -- how thinking works. He attempts to elucidate what exactly differentiates human thinking from all previous attempts at building truly intelligent non-human computers. I personally think that he succeeds.

You will be pleasantly surprised by the ease with which Hawkins' theories mesh with how you perceive your own thoughts. While he acknowledges that some of his specific functional theories will most likely be disproven, the overall hierarchy for thought that he presents seems hindsight-intuitive and highly probable. Hawkins' is the first theory of thinking that correctly applies evolutionary theory. He looks for how incremental creation of the higher brain functions would incrementally aid survival and therefor select for animals who have the cortex and then incrementally for those that have more and better cortex tissue. As with any evolved feature, intelligence didn't spring fully grown from the sands of time.

There is no magical thinking in chapters 1-6 of "On Intelligence". In the last two chapters, I found that some of Hawkins' arguments and theories got a bit on the magical side, but it's alright, he warns you that they are less founded in reality. Chapter 7 attempts to answer the age-old questions about consciousness and humanness and Chapter 8 attempts to make forward looking statements. Interestingly, I found these later chapters to be harder to read than the highly technical Chapter 6.

I can definitely see why Hawkins attempted the last two chapters of the book. After reading and stewing on the earlier chapters for some time, I too found my views on the uniqueness of human thought and the future of non-human computers being irrevocably altered. On the other hand, I think that they may have detracted from the overall credibility of the book by being so far less grounded.

One interesting thing that I was able to learn from this book and immediately apply to my own life was exactly how to remember to perform simple tasks. In general, I have always tried to remember to perform some desired action on some object by envisioning the object and describing the action. At least for me, this has been largely unsuccessful. The verbalizing of the action does not form a full mental prediction of its occurrence and therefor does not setup brain-wide alarms when it doesn't happen. On the other hand, envisioning the desired action happening causes significant incongruity when the context in which I wished to perform the action occurs and I do not take the action. Concrete example: I see a trash bag by my door. If I say, "I should take the trash out this morning," it is not very likely to happen. If, on the other hand, I envision the trash bag in my hand as I leave for work this morning, I have setup my mind to do that and if I attempt to do the similar action (leaving without the trash bag), alarms will fire reminding me that some part of what I was expecting is missing. Try it, srsly.

Long and short of this rambling post is that it's a damn good book and I highly recommend that you read it.