Here is the set of my favorite books on one of the most intriguing topics - brain and mind. The mystery of how the stuff in our head works, how it creates the world we see for us, how is it that we are self-aware is absolutely fascinating. Doubtfully there are people out there who do not care to know the truth. The books in this set shed some light on the (gray) matter.
All of the books are really insightful, but one of them, The User Illusion absolutely blew me away. Mixing neuroscience with physics and information theory, Tor Norretranders paints a powerful and unexpected picture of consciousness.
The last book in the set that I’ve read, On Intelligence , by the creator of Palm Pilot, Jeff Hawkins has surprised my in a different way. For a long time, I was convinced that intelligence is not possible to build, that it needs to evolve. The major reason is that I thought that intelligence is tightly tied to who we are as species - our emotions, our language, our environment. Jeff argues otherwise. If he is right, and intelligence is just an algorithm the implications are huge - intelligent AI which is nothing like us.
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Great write-up. I agree that three of those are great books, but don’t know about the Quantum Brain… I’ll have to give that a read. You know that Jeff put his theory of the brain to work at a company working on realistically using this theory to solve complex problems: http://www.numenta.com.
Hi Phillip,
Yes, I know. I had the privilege of shaking hands with Jeff at the ETech last year and covered the company on Read/WriteWeb:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/numenta_artificial_intelligence.php
I am absolutely fascinated by what you guys are doing. Would love to have you do a guest post on our blog about numenta’s work as well as have numenta book picks widget. Are you up for that?