Gödel, Escher, Bach An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

are mixed right in with the symbols themselves, whereas on paper, the symbols are static entities, and the rules are in our head ...

the first impression, which should have been wiped out when you learned it was all untrue. Fantasy and fact intermingle very clo ...

The type of decision which a neuron faces-and this can take place up to a thousand times per second-is this: whether or not to f ...

Motor areal Central sulcus Auditory area Cerebellum Brain stem--~ F [GURE 66. The human brain, seen from the left side. It is st ...

Earthworms have isomorphic brains! One could say, "There is only one earthworm." But such one-to-one mappability between individ ...

neurons would reliably create specific images or sensations in the patient. These artificially provoked impressions ranged from ...

outer ring. If an on-center pattern is shown to an off-center neuron, the neuron will slow down in firing (and vice versa). Unif ...

(a) Complex cell (area 17) Stimulus; Response Stimulus; Response Strong Zero Weak Strong ~zem Strong Zero ~Stmng (b) Hypercomple ...

each of them, the visual cortex breaks up into three subregions, called areas 17, 18, and 19 of the cortex. These areas are stil ...

rooms, pictures, faces, and so on. People have looked for evidence of the "funneling" of many low-level neural responses into fe ...

place at some point after the reception of the visual signature and before the words are uttered. One could claim that this funn ...

Are these complexes pretty much the same for everybody? Are corresponding ones found in corresponding places in differ- ent peop ...

Now what does a symbol do, when awakened? A low-level description would say, "Many of its neurons fire." But this no longer inte ...

melody? Or ajoke? Or is it more likely that there would only be symbols for concepts roughly the size of words, and that larger ...

The Prototype Principle The list above seems to be a hierarchy of generality-the top being a very broad conceptual category, the ...

freshly minted instance symbol, the default options can easily be overrid- den, but unless this is explicitly done, they will re ...

symbols for other people who are less familiar but who have something in common with Palindromi, and for whom he can serve as a ...

that this feat could be accomplished by "juggling"-that is, by the single class symbol Hitting back and forth between several di ...

the brain of every human who ever had its component symbols, even if it never was awakened in them. This would mean that to enum ...

FIGURE 68. In this schematic diagram, neurons are imagined as laid out as dots in one plane. Two overlapping neural pathways are ...