The Emergent Mind

When we are trying to solve a problem, what happens? We weigh arguments or rely on intuition before reaching a conscious decision. But what is going on behind the scenes?

In The Emergent Mind, Gaurav Suri and Jay McClelland show that our experience is the tip of an iceberg of brain activity that can be captured in an artificial neural network. Such networks-initially developed as models of ourselves-have become the engines of artificial neural intelligence. Suri and McClelland aren’t reducing mankind to mere machines. Rather, they are showing how a data-driven neural network can create thoughts, emotions, and ideas-a mind-whether in humans or computers.

The Emergent Mind provides a fascinating account of how we reach decisions, why we change our minds, and how we are affected by context and experience. Ultimately, the book gives a new answer to one of our oldest questions: Not just how do minds work, but what is a mind?

Author Biography

Jay McClelland is a professor of Psychology and of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University. He is one of the most influential and well-known cognitive scientists of the past century. He is the founder of the study of artificial neural networks and his publications have been cited over one hundred thousand times. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Gaurav Suri is an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. He is a computational neuroscientist and an experimental psychologist. He is the director of RADLab, where he studies the mechanisms that shape motivated action and decision making.

The authors met in 2014. Both live in the San Francisco Bay area.