Brain, Mind, and Cognition

New books in WS 2024/25:

• A Brief History of Intelligence. Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of AI  by Max Bennett
• A Thousand Brains. A New Theory of Intelligence  by Jeff Hawkins
• Nexus. A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI  by Yuval Noah Harari

Target Audience

Elective Course for Students in a Masters degree program at TUM (e.g. MSEI, MSCE, MSPE, ...)

Language:

English, participants should have a decent command of the English language

Dates

Kick-Off Meeting: 17th of October 2024, 13:15
(Kick-Off will be online, the remaining course in person)

Credits

2 SWS, 6 ECTS

Contents

The course attempts to motivate the participants to actively think about the topic "Brain, Mind & Cognition" stimulated by reading and discussing books on this topic.

The seminar is structured like a reading circle. The participants read a book on the subject of "Brain, Mind & Cognition". Every week the group meets and discusses the main points of the current book. To this end we use various forms of group discussion (speed-dating, fishbowl, world cafe, debate, etc.).  Besides this oral processing participants are also asked to put down their thinking in writing, i.e., in the form of short essays on what has been said in the book and what it means to the individual. Review of the submitted essays is done in a peer-review style, i.e., students are reviewing.

It is the goal of this course to read and digest information, to stimulate new thoughts as well as to improve the spoken and written communication skills. The books are supposed to be jargon-free, interesting or even popular books on the topic, which are mostly with only very limited amount of mathematical notation.  

We will read the following books during the winter term 2024/2025:

• A Brief History of Intelligence. Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of AI  by Max Bennett
• A Thousand Brains. A New Theory of Intelligence  by Jeff Hawkins
• Nexus. A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI  by Yuval Noah Harari

Books read in earlier seminars

• Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
• A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
• The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect by Judea Pearl
• On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins
• The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms by Margaret Boden
• Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer
• This Is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin
• I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
• Emergence by Steven Johnson
• Embodied Cognition by Lawrence Shapiro
• Moral Machines by Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen
• Last Ape Standing by Chip Walter
• The Stories of Ibis by Hiroshi Yamamoto and Natsuki Lee
• The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller
• From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniell C. Dennett 
• I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
• Superintelligence: Paths, Danger, Strategies by Nick Bostrom
• How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence by Rolf Pfeifer
• Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
• Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark
• Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life by Steve Johnson
• The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos
• How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now by Stanislas Dehaene
• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Being You by Anil Seth
• How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barret

Exams

The final grade of this course is based on the submitted essays and the quality of the submitted reviews.

Moodle

The course will be administered in Moodle.