BOOK REVIEW
Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind
by Stephen Grossberg 2023
About the Author
For the past 50 years, since his foundational articles appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1967-1980, Stephen Grossberg has been internationally recognized as the most important pioneer and current research leader who introduces and develops neural network models and mathematical methods for both biological and artificial intelligence. This work has always had its foundation in discoveries about biological and machine learning. More generally, Grossberg is the world’s leading scientist/engineer who discovers and models neural design principles and mechanisms that enable the behavior of individuals, or machines, to adapt autonomously in real time to unexpected environmental challenges. These discoveries have laid the scientific foundations of the revolutionary computational paradigm of autonomous adaptive intelligence, and his neural network models have been applied to many large-scale problems in engineering and technology, notably the design of
increasingly autonomous adaptive algorithms and mobile agents. To acknowledge these contributions, Grossberg received the 2015 Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the 2017 Frank Rosenblatt Award of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the 2019 Donald O. Hebb Award of the International Neural Network Society.
About the Book
“The polymath Freeman Dyson once likened mathematicians to birds and frogs:
‘Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in concepts that unify our thinking and bring together diverse problems from different parts of the landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in the details of particular objects, and they solve problems one at a time.’
Grossberg’s genius lies in embodying both, and in recognizing that “obvious hypotheses, with which no one would disagree, together imply conclusions about deep properties of brain organization.” Can a deep understanding of boundaries and surfaces of simple, toy objects lead to the most profound insights into the nature of learning and attention? Can an understanding of how silence flows across time and alters the perception of words uttered before it, help explain consciousness itself? Grossberg shows how.” — Sai Gaddam, Boston University
“Stephen Grossberg is one of the most original and influential theorists in contemporary cognitive science and computational neuroscience. In Conscious MIND Resonant BRAIN, he takes the reader on an eye-opening tour in which he addresses fundamental problems of mind and brain from his unique theoretical perspective. This is an important book that should be of interest to anyone who wonders how a brain can give rise to a mind.” — Daniel L. Schacter, Harvard University
“This book is not for the faint of heart. Stephen Grossberg has been a giant in the field of computational neuroscience for 60 years. In this book he presents his carefully developed, integrative neurobiological theory on how the nervous system generates our conscious lives. It is bold yet self-reflective and therein challenging to all students trying to figure out how the brain does its tricks. A must read.” — Michael Gazzaniga, University of California at Santa Barbara
How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it?
This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it.
The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution’s selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots.
Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species.
The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically.
Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.
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