Some ultra-short book reviews on cognitive neuroscience
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins & Sandra Blakeslee (2004)—very good. Focused on the neocortex—thalamus—hippocampus system, how it’s arranged, what computations it’s doing, what’s the relation between the hippocampus and neocortex, etc. More on Jeff Hawkins’s more recent work here.
I am a strange loop by Hofstadter (2007)—I dunno, I didn’t feel like I got very much out of it, although it’s possible that I had already internalized some of the ideas from other sources. I mostly agreed with what he said. I probably got more out of watching Hofstadter give a little lecture on analogical reasoning (example) than from this whole book.
Consciousness and the brain by Dehaene (2014)—very good. Maybe I could have saved time by just reading Kaj’s review, there wasn’t that much more to the book beyond that.
Conscience by Patricia Churchland (2019)—I hated it. I forget whether I thought it was vague / vacuous, or actually wrong. Apparently I have already blocked the memory!
How to Create a Mind by Kurzweil (2014)—Parts of it were redundant with On Intelligence (which I had read earlier), but still worthwhile. His ideas about how brain-computer interfaces are supposed to work (in the context of cortical algorithms) are intriguing; I’m not convinced, hoping to think about it more.
Rethinking Consciousness by Graziano (2019)—A+, see my review here
The Accidental Mind by Linden (2008)—Lots of fun facts. The conceit / premise (that the brain is a kludgy accident of evolution) is kinda dumb and overdone—and I disagree with some of the surrounding discussion—but that’s not really a big part of the book, just an excuse to talk about lots of fun neuroscience.
The Myth of Mirror Neurons by Hickok (2014)—A+, lots of insight about how cognition works, especially the latter half of the book. Prepare to skim some sections of endlessly beating a dead horse (as he dubunks seemingly endless lists of bad arguments in favor of some aspect of mirror neurons). As a bonus, you get treated to an eloquent argument for the “intense world” theory of autism, and some aspects of predictive coding.
Surfing Uncertainty by Clark (2015)—I liked it. See also SSC review. I think there’s still work to do in fleshing out exactly how these types of algorithms work; it’s too easy to mix things up and oversimplify when just describing things qualitatively (see my feeble attempt here, which I only claim is a small step in the right direction).
Rethinking innateness by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett (1996)—I liked it. Reading Steven Pinker, you get the idea that connectionists were a bunch of morons who thought that the brain was just a simple feedforward neural net. This book provides a much richer picture.
Some ultra-short book reviews on cognitive neuroscience
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins & Sandra Blakeslee (2004)—very good. Focused on the neocortex—thalamus—hippocampus system, how it’s arranged, what computations it’s doing, what’s the relation between the hippocampus and neocortex, etc. More on Jeff Hawkins’s more recent work here.
I am a strange loop by Hofstadter (2007)—I dunno, I didn’t feel like I got very much out of it, although it’s possible that I had already internalized some of the ideas from other sources. I mostly agreed with what he said. I probably got more out of watching Hofstadter give a little lecture on analogical reasoning (example) than from this whole book.
Consciousness and the brain by Dehaene (2014)—very good. Maybe I could have saved time by just reading Kaj’s review, there wasn’t that much more to the book beyond that.
Conscience by Patricia Churchland (2019)—I hated it. I forget whether I thought it was vague / vacuous, or actually wrong. Apparently I have already blocked the memory!
How to Create a Mind by Kurzweil (2014)—Parts of it were redundant with On Intelligence (which I had read earlier), but still worthwhile. His ideas about how brain-computer interfaces are supposed to work (in the context of cortical algorithms) are intriguing; I’m not convinced, hoping to think about it more.
Rethinking Consciousness by Graziano (2019)—A+, see my review here
The Accidental Mind by Linden (2008)—Lots of fun facts. The conceit / premise (that the brain is a kludgy accident of evolution) is kinda dumb and overdone—and I disagree with some of the surrounding discussion—but that’s not really a big part of the book, just an excuse to talk about lots of fun neuroscience.
The Myth of Mirror Neurons by Hickok (2014)—A+, lots of insight about how cognition works, especially the latter half of the book. Prepare to skim some sections of endlessly beating a dead horse (as he dubunks seemingly endless lists of bad arguments in favor of some aspect of mirror neurons). As a bonus, you get treated to an eloquent argument for the “intense world” theory of autism, and some aspects of predictive coding.
Surfing Uncertainty by Clark (2015)—I liked it. See also SSC review. I think there’s still work to do in fleshing out exactly how these types of algorithms work; it’s too easy to mix things up and oversimplify when just describing things qualitatively (see my feeble attempt here, which I only claim is a small step in the right direction).
Rethinking innateness by Jeffrey Elman, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett (1996)—I liked it. Reading Steven Pinker, you get the idea that connectionists were a bunch of morons who thought that the brain was just a simple feedforward neural net. This book provides a much richer picture.