The Brain

Ian Turner, a friend of mine, passed along this great set of articles in The Economist. It's a survey of research into the brain. As Ian puts it, "It touches on some of the things that On Intelligence looked at, but also takes the more holistic view I felt was lacking from that volume." (On Intelligence is one of my favorite books).

To read the survey, first get the login cookie here:
http://economist.com/premium/?aid=257

Then read the survey here:
http://economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=8407261

Speaking of On Intelligence, I recently ran into a professor named Tom Dean who is currently working at Google to try to implement some of Jeff Hawkins' ideas from On Intelligence using google's infrastructure. Here's a technical report describing some of Tom's recent work in the area:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/pubs/techreports/reports/CS-06-14.html

And here's a video of a talk he gave recently at the Redwood Center for Theoretical
Neuroscience (founded by Jeff Hawkins'):

http://www.archive.org/details/Redwood_Center_2006_11_28_Dean

Ever since I read On Intelligence I've dreamed of implementing Hawkins' ideas about intelligence using google infrastructure. Maybe this is my chance... :)