Jay Maclelland partnered with Gaurav Suri, who earned his doctorate in psychology from Stanford and is now an associate professor of psychology at San Francisco State University.
Rationale for the Book
The authors shared conviction that most people think about their mind as a special kind of entity that exists in a conceptual or experiential realtime and that maybe even comes from some sort of divine stuff.
Research in the psychological and brain sciences, however, supports a different view, one we wanted to share with a wide audience.
The key idea is this: Whenever we have a perceptual experience, react to a situation, or feel a certain way about something we observe, that is all coming from processes taking place within the very rich system of interacting neurons in our brains.
Models developed in this book illustrate how this happens.
The book “The Emergent Mind” captured the idea that the mind does not exist as a unitary thing but arises from the interactions of very simple parts, none of which are themselves intelligent.
