But he is obsessed with the workings of the human brain. In fact, in January 1986, I abandoned my business career to pursue that interest full-time. I enrolled in a graduate-level biophysics program and began searching for a theoretical understanding of what our brains do and how they work. I had two big insights that eventually related to my work at Palm Computing. The first had to do with memory.
People love to make comparisons between computers and the brain.
But the brain is not at all like a digital computer. It has no processor, no software, no random-access memory. Your brain uses a type of memory called auto-associative memory. Auto-associative memory can generalize, fill in missing pieces of information, and work well with incomplete and even inaccurate data. Research in auto-associative memory has remained obscure to computer people because they haven't seen how to apply it.