Why can't a computer be more like a brain?

newtronic writes: "Jeff Hawkins, who founded Palm Computing, writes in IEEEE Spectrum, Why can't a computer be more like a brain? In this article, he brings us up to date with his latest endeavor, Numenta. He covers progress since his book On Intelligenceand gives details on Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) which is a platform for simulating neocortexial activity. Numenta has created a framework which allows anyone to build HTMs."