Readers who gobbled up Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines and Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open will find more intriguing food for thought here. Hawkins does a good job of outlining current brain research for a general audience, and his enthusiasm for brains is surprisingly contagious.

"[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence,"

Hawkins presents his ideas, with help from New York Times science writer Blakeslee, in chatty, easy-to-grasp language that still respects the brain's technical complexity. He fully anticipates—even welcomes—the controversy he may provoke within the scientific community and admits that he might be wrong, even as he offers a checklist of potential discoveries that could prove him right. His engaging speculations are sure to win fans of authors like Steven Johnson and Daniel Dennett.

Hawkins virtually encapsulates for a popular audience the scientific literature on how the neocortex constructs a model of the world. The author becomes quite detailed in his explanations of memory formation yet never digresses from his core precept that intelligence is prediction. His argument is complex but comprehensible, and his curiosity will intrigue anyone interested in the lessons neurobiology may hold for AI.

On Intelligence

When did Darwinian evolution begin?

Darwinian evolution did not go back to the beginning of life. In early times, the process called Horizontal Gene Transfer, the sharing of genes between unrelated species, was prevalent. It becomes more prevalent, the further back you go in time.

In this golden age of pre-Darwinian life, horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist.

But then, one evil day, a cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. The Darwinian interlude had begun.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. Cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change, and we are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

The Darwinian Interlude, by Freeman Dyson

Click through the thumbnails for higher-resolution (but still only ~1 MP) bitmaps of the images.

IBM will create a model of the circuitry in the human neocortex, which is believed to be the center for higher cognitive functions. It is also the portion of the brain that evolved most recently and that is unique to mammals.

Over the next two years scientists from both organizations will work together using the huge computational capacity of IBM’s eServer Blue Gene supercomputer to create a detailed model of the circuitry in the neocortex – the largest and most complex part of the human brain. By expanding the project to model other areas of the brain, scientists hope to eventually build an accurate, computer-based model of the entire brain.

"What really matters is not the power itself, but how it is applied to accelerate innovation and discovery in science, engineering and business."

Researchers can learn more about the morphology of the neocortex by inserting blue dye into each neuron. This image shows a fraction of the cells and connections within the neocortex's microcircuitry. (Partial summary from CNET)

Mapping the human brain

How do you explain a complex scientific idea simply to non-scientists? What makes the difference between an inspiring science presenter and a droning bore? Where does charisma come from and what use is it?

This is an open competition to "become the new face of science" for the UK. Watch the finalists and cast your vote.

FameLab

A team of scientists at the University of Utah has proposed that the unusual pattern of genetic diseases seen among Jews of central or northern European origin, or Ashkenazim, is the result of natural selection for enhanced intellectual ability.

"It would be hard to overstate how politically incorrect this paper is," said Steven Pinker.

The Utah researchers have built on an idea from a 1994 article by Jared Diamond.

Researchers Say Intelligence and Diseases May Be Linked

Not so long ago neuroscientists believed that sex differences in the brain were limited mainly to those regions responsible for mating behavior. That view, however, has now been knocked aside by a surge of findings that highlight the influence of sex on many areas of cognition and behavior, including memory, emotion, vision, hearing, the processing of faces and the brain's response to stress hormones.

His Brain, Her Brain

The nation's and the world's long-term threats often get ignored altogether or are even made worse by shortsighted decisions. In everyday life, responsible people look out for the long term despite the needs of the here and now: we do homework, we save for retirement, we take out insurance. The same principles should surely apply to society as a whole. But how can leaders weigh the present against the future? How can they avoid being paralyzed by scientific uncertainty?

Shaping the Future

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities, earthquakes, solar flares, moon craters, wars and people's personal fortunes all appear to follow power laws. The origin of power-law behaviour has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a century. Here we review some of the empirical evidence for the existence of power-law forms and the theories proposed to explain them.

Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law

We study networks that connect points in geographic space, such as transportation networks and the Internet. We find that there are strong signatures in these networks of topography and use patterns, giving the networks shapes that are quite distinct from one another and from non-geographic networks. We offer an explanation of these differences in terms of the costs and benefits of transportation and communication, and give a simple model based on the Monte Carlo optimization of these costs and benefits that reproduces well the qualitative features of the networks studied.

The spatial structure of networks

There are networks in almost every part of our lives. Some of them are familiar and obvious: the Internet, the power grid, the road network. Others are less obvious but just as important. The patterns of friendships or acquaintances between people form a social network. Boards of Directors join together in networks of corporations. The workings of the body's cells are dictated by a metabolic network of chemical reactions. In recent years, sociologists, physicists, biologists, and others have learned how to probe these networks and uncover their structures, shedding light on the inner workings of systems ranging from bacteria to the whole of human society. This lecture looks at some new discoveries regarding networks, how these discoveries were made, and what they tell us about the way the world works.

The Internet, Epidemics, and Kevin Bacon: The Emerging Science of Networks