The Birth of Reason. How Intelligence Arises in Humans and Neural Networks

Imagine that you are in a supermarket, reaching for your favorite yogurt, but at the last moment you grab a product from an unfamiliar manufacturer. What makes you suddenly change your mind or act against your own beliefs? Cognitive psychologist Jay McClelland and neuroscientist Gaurav Suri explain the driving force behind our actions through the idea of emergence without a single formula. There are about one hundred billion cells in our brain, but none of them can think. Only by working together do they produce what we call the mind. Several factors influence our choices at the supermarket shelves—attention, mood, habit, recently seen advertisements—and we go for the most persistent one, then explain this choice to ourselves. The authors describe how these same principles drive neural networks, which were originally created as a model of the brain, how they resemble us, where they already surpass humans, and where we are still stronger.