How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe?
John R. Anderson
Reviews and Awards
An eloquent, personal and closely argued book, that synthesizes decades of Anderson's ground-breaking work, integrates that work with the latest advances from brain imaging, and provides inspiration and direction for the future of cognitive science. This book puts cognitive architecture back at the heart of the subject, and provides a rich and coherent account of the computational machine that is the human brain. - Nick Chater, University College London, UK
In this ground-breaking book, John Anderson brings together research on computational models of the mind and research on the operation of the brain. The book also provides the best description of the latest version of ACT, which is a significant extension in functionality and theory from its predecessors. The book is a must read for researchers and students in Cognitive Science. - John E. Laird, University of Michigan, USA
In 2006 John Anderson received the world's major award in cognitive science, the Heineken Prize, for his groundbreaking theory on human cognition. His new book represents a courageous effort to further develop that theory; ambitious in its attempt to develop a coherent, general theory of human cognition of all of its physical, computational, and neuroscientific detail. It seems to me that the advanced tools of the present theory can, with great profit, be applied in meeting an ultimate challenge: explaining the role of language in human cognition. - Willem J. M. Levelt, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Germany
The mission of cognitive neuroscience is (or at least should be) to connect cognition with neural function, to explain how gray matter gives rise to the psychology of thought. Where many people settle for a mere geography - an inventory of what happens where - Anderson aims for something much more ambitious: an understanding of how cognition happens at all. By combining trenchant psychological analysis with well-motivated neuroimaging, Anderson provides a new paradigm for addressing the core questions in cognitive neuroscience. An important step in the science of relating mind and brain. - Gary Marcus, Infant Language Center, New York University, USA