Connectionists: My new book on YOUR CREATIVE BRAIN AND AI was just published

Thu Feb 5 17:50:50 EST 2026

Dear Michael,

It’s good to hear from you!

I hope that you and yours are all doing very well.

About the Newton and Einstein of the Mind: Yes, it is a bit much. I first was called that in 1989 when I was invited to give the annual University lecture at Boston University to a general Boston-area audience. My topic was:

"Human Vision and Neural Computation: Illusion and Reality in the Mind's Eye”.
The then-President of BU, John Silber, introduced me. John had a reputation as quite a tough guy, so when he introduced me as the Newton and Einstein of the Mind, I almost fainted. He apparently checked me out with various leading scientists before deciding to do that. Fortunately, I had over prepared to the point that I could perform OK until I recovered.

I will quote below from one of the reviews of my 2021 Magnum Opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, as to why Silber might have called me that.

As to the Father of AI title: That was something that colleagues of mine started to informally call me many years ago because of my role in introducing neural networks in 1957 for modeling how brains make minds, which is a key theme in AI. I was doing it when many AI practitioners were still developing symbolic AI models, until they finally fit a brick wall.

This name started to become more frequent when Hinton started to be called the Godfather of AI, and got a Nobel Prize in Physics, for his work particularly with back propagation (with priority  due to Amari, Parker, and Werbos, among others) and its embodiment in Deep Learning, years after I had already laid the foundations of biological neural networks. Many colleagues wrote to me then about how disappointed they were that I did not get a Nobel Prize for my earlier and deeper discoveries.

As to the Newton and Einstein of the Mind title, here is the 2021 book review that tries to explain it:
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5.0 out of 5 stars<https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3426Z80I21XHM/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8>
 Magnum Opus of the Newton and the Einstein of the Mind<https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3426Z80I21XHM/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8>
Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2021
Format: Hardcover<https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0190070552/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_fmt?formatType=current_format>
In 1989, Stephen Grossberg gave the annual University Lecture at Boston University to a Boston-area audience. The University President, John Silber, introduced Grossberg as the Newton and the Einstein of the Mind. Silber had done his homework before his startlingly laudatory introduction.

Grossberg had already introduced the field of biological neural networks as a college Freshman in 1957 as well as the then-revolutionary paradigm of using nonlinear systems of differential equations to model how brains make minds. These equations included the laws for neuronal activitation, or short-term memory (STM); activity-dependent habituation, or medium-term memory (MTM); and learning and memory, or long-term memory (LTM) that still form the foundation of all biological models of how brains make minds.

Grossberg then rapidly began introducing and developing an astonishing range and depth of neural models whose topics today, 64 years later, include essentially all the most important processes of conscious and unconscious human intelligence.

By discovering the foundational laws of how brains make minds, and using them to build unifying theories that explain so much important data, Grossberg has played a role similar to that played by Isaac Newton in his great work on celestial mechanics. This may be why John Silber mentioned Newton in his introduction.

But why Einstein? Albert Einstein was famous for using thought experiments to derive fundamental laws of physics, including both Special Relativity Theory and General Relativity Theory. Thought experiments use familiar facts from daily life to derive profound scientific conclusions. They are a way to make scientific ideas accessible to many people.

Grossberg is a master of using thought experiments to derive profound conclusions about learning, cognition, and emotion. His thought experiments use facts that are familiar to everyone because they represent ubiquitous environmental pressures on the evolution of our brains.

In particular, Grossberg published a famous thought experiment in 1980 to derive Adaptive Resonance Theory, or ART, which is currently the most advanced cognitive and neural theory of how our brains learn to attend, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world. All the foundational hypotheses of ART have been supported by subsequent psychological and neurobiological experiments, and it has also provided principled and unifying explanations of hundreds of additional experiments.

Nowhere during the thought experiment are the words mind or brain mentioned. ART design principles and mechanisms are thus a universal solution to a learning problem that Grossberg called the stability-plasticity dilemma because it asks how any system can learn quickly without experiencing catastrophic forgetting.

Remarkably, ART also explains how humans consciously see, hear, feel, and know things about the world, and use these conscious states to effectively plan and act to realize valued goals.

Grossberg's proposed solution of the mind-body problem thus arises from a computational analysis of how humans and other animals autonomously learn in a changing world. Because the words mind and brain are never mentioned in his derivations, they can be used as a blueprint for designing autonomous adaptive intelligent algorithms and mobile robots for technology and AI.

I am grateful to have had the privilege of doing science as a PhD student with this creative genius. His impact on science, technology, and society will, I believe, continue to grow just as did the contributions of Newton and Einstein. His Magnum Opus may help to make this happen because it articulates Principia of Mind in a self-contained and accessible way to reach the broadest possible audience.
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Best,

Steve

Get Outlook for Mac <https://aka.ms/GetOutlookForMac>

From: Michael Arbib <arbib at usc.edu>
Date: Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 1:49 PM
To: Grossberg, Stephen <steve at bu.edu>, connectionists <connectionists at cs.cmu.edu>
Cc: Michael Arbib <arbib at usc.edu>
Subject: Re: Connectionists: My new book on YOUR CREATIVE BRAIN AND AI was just published

Dear Steve:

Your new book “YOUR CREATIVE BRAIN AND AI: How We Learn and Consciously Experience ART, MUSIC, and MEANING” looks fascinating, and I was impressed to learn that you “have been called the NEWTON AND EINSTEIN OF THE MIND”.

This reminded me of an anecdote from a paper, TOWARDS A THEORY OF LANGUAGE PERFORMANCE, that Pierre Lavorel and I published in 1977:

“About ten years ago, a meeting was held to discuss the possible directions for a proposed Max-Planck-Institute in Linguistics. During a cocktail party conversation, a number of linguists began to debate whether Chomsky were better viewed as the Newton or Einstein of their field; they were insulted when a psychologist [Derek Broadbent] suggested that Euclid would offer a more apt comparison.”

Best wishes

Michael

________________________________________________________-

Here is the book blurb:

“How do our brains give rise to our conscious minds? How do our minds learn and consciously experience miraculous creations of our civilizations, such as visual art, music, and the languages whose meanings enable us to think and communicate about our experiences in the world?

“How does human learning and language differ from some Artificial Intelligence algorithms that fail to explain how human minds work? Unlike these AI algorithms, whose flaws are explained in the book, human brains provide a blueprint for the paradigm of autonomous adaptive intelligence that promises to revolutionize all aspects of society during this century and beyond.

“This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have proposed. For over 50 years, Stephen Grossberg has been internationally acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader whose work explains how our brains make our minds.

He is often called the FATHER OF AI because he introduced the modern neural networks paradigm in 1957 as a Dartmouth college Freshman, as well as the main equations that help to explain how our brains make our minds.

He has also been called the NEWTON AND EINSTEIN OF THE MIND because he and many gifted collaborators have subsequently developed neural network models of essentially all the main processes whereby our brains make our conscious and unconscious minds in both healthy individuals and clinical patients.

“Grossberg published his award-winning Magnum Opus, Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain: How Each Brain Makes a Mind, in 2021 to provide a self-contained and non-technical overview and synthesis of these discoveries. The current book describes his recent discoveries about art, music, and meaning in accessible language intended to appeal to all readers who love art and music, and who wonder about the mystery of how languages acquire meaning.”

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Best,

Steve

Stephen Grossberg

Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems

Director, Center for Adaptive Systems

Emeritus Professor of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering

Boston University

sites.bu.edu/steveg/

steve at bu.edu<mailto:steve at bu.edu>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Grossberg<https://urldefense.com/v3/__http:/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Grossberg__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!vPE7wQSFC7MSetQwmyU5tlbgJldTB8w7Vo4sVDSGelfWF33iEpzHFUCtSVMwTiOC257viDbH7A$>

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https://sites.bu.edu/steveg/files/2021/08/Grossberg-CV-8-14-21.pdf<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/sites.bu.edu/steveg/files/2021/08/Grossberg-CV-8-14-21.pdf__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!vPE7wQSFC7MSetQwmyU5tlbgJldTB8w7Vo4sVDSGelfWF33iEpzHFUCtSVMwTiOC256wzr2isQ$>

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https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/dp/0190070552<https://urldefense.com/v3/__https:/www.amazon.com/Conscious-Mind-Resonant-Brain-Makes/dp/0190070552__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!vPE7wQSFC7MSetQwmyU5tlbgJldTB8w7Vo4sVDSGelfWF33iEpzHFUCtSVMwTiOC257azJkgnw$>

[Grossberg cover.jpeg]

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