Computers can be trained to beat chess grandmasters, but can they ever be taught to think like human brains do? Jeff Hawkins, a technopreneur, has been obsessed with finding out the answer to this question for years. In this title, the designer of PalmPilot (the best-selling palm-held computer), comes up with a hypothesis while pondering over the answer.

According to him, scientists working in artificial intelligence and neural networks have so long focused too much on an input-output mechanism, rather than the original neurological system that connects brain cells.

The cerebral cortex ? the seat of intelligence in the brain ? has nearly 30 billion neurons, specialised cells which have thousands of electrical connections among themselves.

These connections allow the cortex to store and process information in a fundamentally different way to digital computers. So Hawkins suggests a new type of a computer (‘a smarter Einstein)’ building up a library of of experiences to analyse new situations.

This is a landmark publication. Read it to get a new view of intelligence.