I design mobile computers and I study brains.

Today's talk is about brains and -- (Audience member cheers)

Yay! I have a brain fan out there.

(Laughter)

If I could have my first slide,

you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations.

So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory,

why it is important that we should develop one

and what we can do about it.

I'll try to do all that in 20 minutes.

I have two affiliations.

Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days,

but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute

called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park.

We study theoretical neuroscience and how the neocortex works.

I'm going to talk all about that.

I have one slide on my other life, the computer life,

and that's this slide here.

These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years,

starting from the very original laptop

to some of the first tablet computers

and so on, ending up most recently with the Treo,

and we're continuing to do this.

I've done this because I believe mobile computing

is the future of personal computing,

and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better

by working on these things.

But this was, I admit, all an accident.

I really didn't want to do any of these products.

Very early in my career

I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry.

Before that, I just have to tell you

about this picture of Graffiti I picked off the web the other day.

I was looking for a picture for Graffiti that'll text input language.

I found a website dedicated to teachers who want to make script-writing things

across the top of their blackboard,

and they had added Graffiti to it, and I'm sorry about that.

(Laughter)

So what happened was,

when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in '79,

I went to work for Intel and was in the computer industry,

and three months into that, I fell in love with something else.

I said, "I made the wrong career choice here,"

and I fell in love with brains.

This is not a real brain.

This is a picture of one, a line drawing.

And I don't remember exactly how it happened,

but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind.

In September of 1979,

Scientific American came out with a single-topic issue about the brain.

It was one of their best issues ever.

They talked about the neuron, development, disease, vision

and all the things you might want to know about brains.

It was really quite impressive.

One might've had the impression we knew a lot about brains.

But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame.

Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA.

And he wrote a story basically saying, this is all well and good,

but you know, we don't know diddly squat about brains,

and no one has a clue how they work,

so don't believe what anyone tells you.

This is a quote from that article, he says:

"What is conspicuously lacking" -- he's a very proper British gentleman --

"What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas

in which to interpret these different approaches."

I thought the word "framework" was great.

He didn't say we didn't have a theory.

He says we don't even know how to begin to think about it.

We don't even have a framework.

We are in the pre-paradigm days, if you want to use Thomas Kuhn.

So I fell in love with this.

I said, look: We have all this knowledge about brains -- how hard can it be?

It's something we can work on in my lifetime; I could make a difference.

So I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business.

First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there.

I said, I want to build intelligent machines too,

but I want to study how brains work first.

And they said, "Oh, you don't need to do that.

You're just going to program computers, that's all.

I said, you really ought to study brains.

They said, "No, you're wrong."

I said, "No, you're wrong," and I didn't get in.

(Laughter)

I was a little disappointed -- pretty young --

but I went back again a few years later,

this time in California, and I went to Berkeley.

And I said, I'll go in from the biological side.

So I got in the PhD program in biophysics.

I was like, I'm studying brains now. Well, I want to study theory.

They said, "You can't study theory about brains.

You can't get funded for that.

And as a graduate student, you can't do that."

So I said, oh my gosh.

I was depressed; I said, but I can make a difference in this field.

I went back in the computer industry

and said, I'll have to work here for a while.

That's when I designed all those computer products.

(Laughter)

I said, I want to do this for four years, make some money,

I was having a family, and I would mature a bit,

and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit.

Well, it took longer than four years. It's been about 16 years.

But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it.

So why should we have a good brain theory?

Well, there's lots of reasons people do science.

The most basic one is, people like to know things.

We're curious, and we go out and get knowledge.

Why do we study ants? It's interesting.

Maybe we'll learn something useful, but it's interesting and fascinating.

But sometimes a science has other attributes

which makes it really interesting.

Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves;

it'll tell us who we are.

Evolution did this and Copernicus did this,

where we have a new understanding of who we are.

And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain.

Our bodies are hanging along for the ride,

but my brain is talking to your brain.

And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive,

we need to understand brains.

Another thing is sometimes science leads to big societal benefits, technologies,

or businesses or whatever.

This is one, too, because when we understand how brains work,

we'll be able to build intelligent machines.

That's a good thing on the whole,

with tremendous benefits to society,

just like a fundamental technology.

So why don't we have a good theory of brains?

People have been working on it for 100 years.

Let's first take a look at what normal science looks like.

This is normal science.

Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists.

The theorist guy says, "I think this is what's going on,"

the experimentalist says, "You're wrong."

It goes back and forth, this works in physics, this in geology.

But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like?

This is what neuroscience looks like.

We have this mountain of data,

which is anatomy, physiology and behavior.

You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains.

There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year,

and every one of them is doing research in brains.

A lot of data, but no theory.

There's a little wimpy box on top there.

And theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way

in the neurosciences.

And it's a real shame.

Now, why has this come about?

If you ask neuroscientists why is this the state of affairs,

first, they'll admit it.

But if you ask them, they say,

there's various reasons we don't have a good brain theory.

Some say we still don't have enough data,

we need more information, there's all these things we don't know.

Well, I just told you there's data coming out of your ears.

We have so much information, we don't even know how to organize it.

What good is more going to do?

Maybe we'll be lucky and discover some magic thing, but I don't think so.

This is a symptom of the fact that we just don't have a theory.

We don't need more data, we need a good theory.

Another one is sometimes people say,

"Brains are so complex, it'll take another 50 years."

I even think Chris said something like this yesterday, something like,

it's one of the most complicated things in the universe.

That's not true -- you're more complicated than your brain.

You've got a brain.

And although the brain looks very complicated,

things look complicated until you understand them.

That's always been the case.

So we can say, my neocortex, the part of the brain I'm interested in,

has 30 billion cells.

But, you know what? It's very, very regular.

In fact, it looks like it's the same thing repeated over and over again.

It's not as complex as it looks. That's not the issue.

Some people say, brains can't understand brains.

Very Zen-like. Woo.

(Laughter)

You know, it sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point?

It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver.

It's got a lot of cells in it too, right?

So, you know, I don't think there's anything to that.

And finally, some people say,

"I don't feel like a bunch of cells -- I'm conscious.

I've got this experience, I'm in the world.

I can't be just a bunch of cells."

Well, people used to believe there was a life force to be living,

and we now know that's really not true at all.

And there's really no evidence,

other than that people just disbelieve that cells can do what they do.

So some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism,

some really smart people, too, but we can reject all that.

(Laughter)

No, there's something else,

something really fundamental, and it is:

another reason why we don't have a good brain theory

is because we have an intuitive, strongly held but incorrect assumption

that has prevented us from seeing the answer.

There's something we believe that just, it's obvious, but it's wrong.

Now, there's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is,

I'll tell you about the history of it in science.

Look at other scientific revolutions --

the solar system, that's Copernicus,

Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener.

They all have a lot in common with brain science.

First, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it.

But it got more manageable once they had a theory.

The best minds were stumped -- really smart people.

We're not smarter now than they were then;

it just turns out it's really hard to think of things,

but once you've thought of them, it's easy to understand.

My daughters understood these three theories,

in their basic framework, in kindergarten.

It's not that hard -- here's the apple, here's the orange,

the Earth goes around, that kind of stuff.

Another thing is the answer was there all along,

but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing.

It was an intuitive, strongly held belief that was wrong.

In the case of the solar system,

the idea that the Earth is spinning,

the surface is going a thousand miles an hour,

and it's going through the solar system at a million miles an hour --

this is lunacy; we all know the Earth isn't moving.

Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour?

If you said Earth was spinning around in space and was huge --

they would lock you up, that's what they did back then.

So it was intuitive and obvious. Now, what about evolution?

Evolution, same thing.

We taught our kids the Bible says God created all these species,

cats are cats; dogs are dogs; people are people; plants are plants;

they don't change.

Noah put them on the ark in that order, blah, blah.

The fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor.

We all have a common ancestor with the plant in the lobby!

This is what evolution tells us. And it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

And the same thing about tectonic plates.

All the mountains and the continents

are kind of floating around on top of the Earth.

It doesn't make any sense.

So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption,

that's kept us from understanding brains?

I'll tell you. It'll seem obvious that it's correct. That's the point.

Then I'll make an argument why you're incorrect on the other assumption.

The intuitive but obvious thing is:

somehow, intelligence is defined by behavior;

we're intelligent because of how we do things

and how we behave intelligently.

And I'm going to tell you that's wrong.

Intelligence is defined by prediction.