Computers Based on the Functioning of the Human Brain Coming Soon?

During his upbringing in Kingston (Canada) in the 1970s, Lloyd Watts particularly enjoyed listening to the songs of Billy Idol and Elton John, imitating their melodies on his piano. At the same time, he wondered if it would be better if a machine could ‘listen’ to songs and convert them into musical notes.

Prepared by: Vanja Figenwald

Watts never managed to build such a machine, but his decades-long quest to create one has nonetheless resulted in the first commercial technology based on brain biology. Microchips designed by Audience, a company owned by Watts, have begun to be used by mobile phone manufacturers in Asia to improve call quality in noisy environments. The technology is so advanced that a truck can pass by you without being heard on the mobile phone. The chip is modeled after the functioning of the inner ear and part of the cerebral cortex. ‘We did reverse engineering of this part of the brain,’ explains Watts.

The 47-year-old neuroscientist is on the brink of a discovery that many consider fundamental to the future design of computers. Today’s computers are actually just very sophisticated calculators, good mathematicians, but incapable of processing complex sets of information in real-time, in the way that humans can. Now, thanks to advances in understanding biology, scientists believe they can create a new generation of computers based on the principles of human brain function, namely microscopic chemical interactions and electrical impulses that translate sensations into knowledge, and knowledge into decisions and actions. This is the result of some older ideas about artificial intelligence, but dressed in the new guise of recent advancements that have sparked great interest from other companies like IBM and Numenta, a Silicon Valley startup.

However, scientists warn that changes will not happen overnight. ‘The nervous system is extremely sophisticated, so I take my hat off to what has been done so far. I believe we will eventually master the material completely,’ says Carver Mead, a pioneer in microelectronics and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. For one of the most ambitious endeavors in this field, IBM received a $5 million grant from the Pentagon this month to research the creation of intelligent computers. This money is intended for the first phase of a multi-year effort to create computer systems that will simulate brain activities, as well as mimic its size.

The government claims it will use the results to design battlefield monitoring systems that will detect threats and alert troops. Dharmendra Modha, a cognitive computing manager at IBM’s research center in San Jose, predicts a wide range of possible applications for this technology, from detecting concerning trends in climate conditions to predicting catastrophic storms. ‘We are creating a planet covered in sensors,’ he says. ‘We need a global brain, a device that will collect, integrate, and analyze all this data and respond to it if necessary.’

The talent behind Numenta, Jeff Hawkins, has a long history of inventions, such as the first PalmPilot and the first successful smartphone, the Handspring Treo. However, for more than twenty years, his greatest passion has been studying the cerebral cortex and applying that knowledge to computers. Hawkins hopes to produce a software tool for product developers next year that will allow them to mimic image processing in the way the human brain does. Applications could include medical imaging diagnostics, security surveillance, and internet searching. ‘We are laying the groundwork for the second wave of computing,’ says Hawkins.