On Intelligence
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Book Summary Author: Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee Edition: Hardcover Format: Bargain Price Published: 2004-10-03 ISBN: N/A Number of pages: 272 Publisher: Times Books |
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Book Reviews of the On Intelligence
Customer Review: Both broad and deep look at human intelligence (as opposed to the artificial kind)
Summary: 4 Stars
Let me first get a pet peeve out of the way. I don't like ghostwritten books. To me, they do not read well. Instead of being true written works, they have the feel of something transcribed from an oral lecture. Mixing media like that makes a book feel a little wrong to me.
To his credit, Jeff Hawkins picked a good writer in Sandra Blakeslee. Had Hawkins tried to write the book by himself, it may have been less readable. Or perhaps not written at all. Since I did enjoy the book, I will not complain too much about this particular fault. But it does bother me.
On Intelligence is worth reading. A scientist who knows the area well may not agree with all Hawkins says. My sense is that like many successful Silicon Valley engineers, Hawkins has no problem with being too humble. Many of us here think we can understand as an outsider any area better than the specialists in it. This book has a bit of that tone.
(The blurb from venture capitalist John Doerr on the back of the book captured that Silicon Valley hubris perfectly: "Read this book. Burn all the others. It is original, inventive, and thoughtful, from one of the world's foremost thinkers. Jeff Hawkins will change the way the world thinks about intelligence and the prospect of intelligent machines.")
Amateur neuroscientist though he may be, Hawkins has done his homework. He knows a remarkable amount about intelligence, both human and artificial. He has thought a lot about thinking. And he presents his information and his thoughts in a way that got me thinking about how I think as well.
Hawkins says we think in patterns. Our brains expect certain patterns, based on what is in our memory, and act accordingly. If expectation matches reality, we notice nothing. If there is no match, we notice. Hawkins uses the example of walking through our front door at night. If the door had changed in any way during the day - say the knob had shifted to the other side - our brain would tell us something's not right.
With the emphasis on storing patterns in our memory, and comparing what we sense with those patterns, our brains have great mental power despite the fact they operate so slowly. Computers operate much faster, maybe millions of times faster, yet they cannot do many of the things that even a child's brain finds child's play.
For example, Hawkins has a picture made up of a pattern of black shapes on the white page. Look hard enough and the picture of a dalmation emerges from the seeming disorder. A computer could never find that picture. We can.
Most of the book is easy reading. For me, parts were pretty technical and hard to understand. Other parts were speculative opinion that I'm not sure I agree with. Hawkins says, for example, that Einstein's brain was noticeably different in structure from normal, and that may be the key to his genuis. Seems unlikely to me.
All in all, On Intelligence helped me understand better how we think with our remarkable brains. Computers operate differently. Reading about the science behind all this made for a fascinating day or two. I hope that Jeff Hawkins continues with his research, and finds the overarching theory of neuroscience that he has come closer to, but still seeks.