Jeff Hawkins developed the Palm Pilot, the Treo smart phone, and other mobile computerized devices. It's not surprising that he's also very interested in our brain—another pretty good mobile information processor. He's now teamed with Sandra Blakeslee (the renowned New York Times science writer) to produce a marvelous thoughtprovoking book, On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines (2004, Henry Holt).

Educators have obviously always been interested in the nature and development of intelligence, and this interest escalated during the past twenty-five years. The multiple intelligences theories of Howard Gardner (1983), Robert Sternberg (1985), and David Perkins (1995) were especially influential in shaping contemporary educational thought and practice. Intelligence had previously been viewed as a combined cognitive property that could be quantified and placed somewhere along a general intelligence scale that uses 100 as an average score for a given age (IQ, intelligence quotient).

Multiple intelligence theorists argued that intelligence encompasses several separate but interactive cognitive abilities, and that the nature of the current challenge determines the combination that will be used to resolve it. The robustness of a person's individual intelligences may vary, and this could affect the response. For example, a person might be above average in linguistic ability and below average in mathematical ability.