A wonderful talk by Jeff Hawkins. He immediately nails the key point through. I have felt the same way about neuroscience. Until now, brain science has been totally disappointing. There has been no attempt at theory, to go deeper and to understand the brain from its fundamentals. Instead, until now, large amounts of data have been collected, analyzed and used to make behavioral or overall predictions that do not work very well as they are over simplifications of complex problems.
The field of genetics had similar problems in the early 1900s until Watson and Crick came along with their structure of the DNA. Once the most fundamental biological unit, the DNA, had been understood well, all the macro-conclusions of genetics began to make sense and fall into place logically. From the fundamentals, the entire subject of genetics was understood much better as a whole. Since then, there has been great progress in the field. Now, we are able to manipulate DNA and make it do things that we want it to do. Hence, understanding the fundamentals allowed us to comprehend or manipulate complex systems.
So what exactly did Watson and Crick have that so many other biologists didn’t ? Francis Crick had studied physics in university and it was only later that he turned his attention to biology. There were very few other biologists who had studied physics. What this shows is that applying a physics methodology of research to biology can produce great results.
Similarly in neuroscience , we need to bring ideas from other disciplines (primarily, physics, maths and computer science) into biology. As Jeff Hawkins correctly points out, “Biologists have historically never been good at theory and that’s why we need to get physicists and mathematicians to work on such problems”. Jeff Hawkins himself is working on making this vision a reality. And soon, we will see a brain science that is actually based upon theory and then, great things can happen.
