The Wall Street Journal reports that Jeff Hawkins, of Palm and Handspring fame, has been keeping up with his interest in neuroscience. Jeff spends one day off a week from Handspring pursuing his theory that a framework for the human brain should be modeled more on pattern recognition than input and output. His plausible theories have been tested a bit by a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studied whether rats recognized patterns of music (I would’ve started with simple rhythms instead of melody, but I’m no expert on the auditory system). I remember being very uncomfortable with many of the common models for studying the brain; most of my weekly cognitive science “prove you did the reading” assignments resulted in naive critiques of how silly it was to compare the brain to a computer. It is perfectly fine to model a computer after a brain, but to model a brain after a computer still seems short-sighted to me, though it is a useful start for understanding what goes on up there. It surprises me that this article does not mention Jeff’s work on his handwriting recognition algorithms, as that activity is pure pattern recognition. It appears that Jeff is planning to put his money where his mind is. It will be interesting to see what progress he can make partnering with academia to alter a primary paradigm of cognition.