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Since he read a special issue of Scientific American on the brain, Hawkins has always been interested in studying how brains work. Initially, he attempted to start a new department on the subject at his current employer ( Intel), who of course refused. He also attempted to join the MIT AI Lab, but they said they weren't interested in studying actual brains. He eventually decided he would try to find success in the computer industry and then try to use it to support his serious work on brains.
In 2002, he did just that. After finding that there was little interest in doing large-scale theoretical work in neuroscience, Hawkins founded the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Silicon Valley. In 2004, he published On Intelligence (with New York Times science writer Sandra Blakeslee ), laying out his memory-prediction framework of how the brain works, which he says is the first unified theory of the brain.
The theory argues that the key to the brain and intelligence is the ability to make predictions about the world by seeing patterns. He argues that attempts to create an artificial intelligence by simply programming a computer to do what a brain does are flawed and that to actually make an intelligent computer, we simply need to teach it to find and use patterns, not to attempt any specific tasks. He argues that through this method we can build intelligent machines, helping us do all sorts of useful tasks that current computers can't achieve.