Jeff Hawkins got the neuroscience bug in 1979, but it took him many years and two inventions — the Palm Pilot and the Treo smartphone — to put his passion into action. His career arc illustrates how technological acumen and a theoretical mindset can foster one another: both his devices use pattern matching and computational decision-making algorithms that mimic theories of how a brain works.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Hawkins was impressed with a Scientific American article by Nobel laureate Francis Crick. “He was saying we have all these data about neurons and chemical processes in the brain and people act like they know what's going on, but don't believe it,” Hawkins says. “What's lacking is a theoretical framework.” Models were needed to show how the cells and processes interacted.

Hawkins suggested starting a neuroscience division at his first employer, Intel, but was rebuffed. He applied some of his theories about pattern recognition at Grid Systems in Sunnyvale, California, where he worked on handwriting recognition hardware and software. To learn more about how the brain processes pattern-matching, Hawkins went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he researched the workings of the brain's neocortex, which is associated with vision and decision-making. But he was told neocortical theory wasn't a viable thesis option.

That gave him insight into the obstacles of trying to develop an unfashionable field. “I learned that understanding the brain is not just a scientific problem, it's an institutional problem,” Hawkins says.

His next few years were spent back at Grid, which later became Palm, developing Palm Pilot and Treo — which he calls “sort of my day job, like an actor waiting on tables”.

His success led him to start the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, California, and co-write On Intelligence (Times Books, 2004), which expands on themes from his rejected thesis proposal. He later formed Numenta, which designs three-dimensional decision-making trees that can be applied to things from motion-capture video games to traffic sensors mounted on vehicles.

Hawkins thinks applications may drive more institutional change and private investment into neuroscience. “The commercial world is a very powerful way to get people to work on a problem,” Hawkins says. “If you can show a profit, you can get a lot of people to work on this.”