Jeff Hawkins (the author, creator of PalmPilot) has always been interested in how the brain works, and once he made his Palm money, he started a neuroscience in

Jeff Hawkins (the author, creator of PalmPilot) has always been interested in how the brain works, and once he made his Palm money, he started a neuroscience institute. That research along with his own and what he read led him to his theory of how the brain works. It's extracted from lots of real, hard research. He then started a company (Numenta http://www.numenta.com/ http://www.numenta.com/) to create a software implementation of that theory, which has a set of tools you can download and play with. They've had good results consistent with the theories in the book and had some impressive results. There's also a recording of a talk he gave at an O'Reilly conference: http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3499.html http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3499.html So long story short, it is for real. When I read it, I had to stop every 20 minutes or so to catch my breath I found it so exciting and enlightening.