Minds & Machines - Book list

Below are books recommended by Minds & Machines students, complete with student recommender's summary and review. They are mostly of the 'popular science', 'inspirational', kind of books type, suitable for incoming students or anyone interested in the field. If you think of a good book to add to this list, please contact the Director.

• The Language Instinct, by Steven Pinker

        A beginner's guide to why linguistics is so crucial to our study of the mind. Written in an engaging, informal, and often humorous style, the book is broad and connects psycholinguistics with many other fields of study in cognitive science. Another good book by Pinker is How the Mind Works

• The Emperor's New Mind, by Roger Penrose

        This book could suffice as an introductory cognitive science text; its first four chapters are titled "Can a computer have a mind?", "Algorithms and Turing machines", "Mathematics and reality", and "Truth, proof, and insight" The rest of the book is highly speculative, as Penrose waxes on about physics and cosmology, but he's engaging and extremely fun to read.

• A couple of fun books about the weird side of the mind: The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard Cytowic, Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks

• The Computer and the Mind, by Philip Johnson-Laird

        Phil is fun to read, tells a good story, and addresses most of the major struggles in cognitive science: computability, vision, learning + memory, higher-level cognition, language, consciousness.

• Mindware, by Andy Clark

        Clark's a great introduction to the philosophy of cognitive science. Funny, witty, and incredibly informed, he turns the tedium in philosophy into something far more down-to-earth and approachable.

• Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter

        A beautiful introduction to the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, GEB addresses mathematics, self-referentiality, AI, creativity, to name a few of the overarching topics presented. The layman's introduction to Godelian incompleteness is also quite thorough and interesting, as is Hofstadter's apt use of examples from art and music.

• The Design of Everyday Things, by Donald Norman

        Norman explains why cognitive engineering and human factors is so interesting; the lesson here is that cognitive science isn't just some lofty intellectual pursuit to make computers smarter but instead can be applied to real-world problems in engineering and interaction with various technologies.

• The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, by Jacques Hadamard

        Introspection at its finest, this book points out how difficult creativity is to study and understand. Addressing the cognitive science community before it even existed, Hadamard believes that even the most mysterious of mental processes can be picked apart and examined, and the short foray into scientific intuition and invention should be an inspiring read for all.

• On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins

        This book gives a great overview of a radical new theory in the field of AI. It is well written and will help show students coming into the program a new way of thinking about the brain.

• The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil

        The book is pretty fantastical and makes some unsupported predictions about the future of technology and artificial intelligence, but it certainly does get one's mind wondering. A companion book Are We Spiritual Machines, also by Ray Kurzweil, contains arguments against his claims. This is probably the more informative of the books; it was where I first heard of the Chinese Room argument.

• Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, by Steven Johnson

        The book discusses, in a very conversational and engaging tone, how cognition happens and is affected by various brain chemicals and processes.

• Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, by Steven Johnson

        This one is about the emergent properties of sufficiently complex systems - it discusses how 'dumb' parts can, in combination, display 'intelligent' behavior, with examples in several domains.
For more information contact: Bram van Heuveln