Buying Options

Digital List Price:	$57.99
Print List Price:	$58.00
Kindle Price:	$37.67 Save $20.33 (35%)

Promotions apply when you purchase

eBook features:

Highlight, take notes, and search in the book
In this edition, page numbers are just like the physical edition

Deliver to your Kindle Library

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) by [Chris Eliasmith]

Follow the Author

Chris Eliasmith

How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

by Chris Eliasmith (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

27 ratings

Part of: Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures (13 books)

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$37.67

—

Hardcover

"Please retry"

—

$176.94

$153.50

Paperback

"Please retry"

$48.95

$44.64

$33.82

Kindle
$37.67 Read with Our Free App
Hardcover
$153.50

2 Used from $153.50 2 New from $176.94
Paperback
$33.82 - $48.95

8 Used from $33.82 16 New from $44.64

How to Build a Brain provides a detailed exploration of a new cognitive architecture - the Semantic Pointer Architecture - that takes biological detail seriously, while addressing cognitive phenomena. Topics ranging from semantics and syntax, to neural coding and spike-timing-dependent plasticity are integrated to develop the world's largest functional brain model.

ISBN-13

978-0199794546
Edition

Illustrated
Sticky notes

Not Enabled
Publisher

Oxford University Press
Publication date

April 16, 2013
Language

English
File size

25659 KB
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Read with the free Kindle apps (available on iOS, Android, PC & Mac) and on Fire Tablet devices. See all supported devices

This title is not supported on Kindle E-readers or Kindle for Windows 8 app. Learn more

Next 5 for you in this series See full series

Total Price: $430.01

By clicking on the above button, you agree to Amazon's Kindle Store Terms of Use

Peter Sterling
60
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $25.99
Grace Lindsay
156
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Peter Robin Hiesinger
70
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $14.72
PhD Buzsáki, György MD
153
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $17.27
Mark Humphries
69
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Stephen Grossberg
128
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $19.24

Editorial Reviews

Review

"How to Build a Brain takes on a daunting task, focusing on those parts that we think are important for memory, attention, and planning. Previous attempts at building a cognitive architecture have used symbols or connectionist networks, but Eliasmith uses spiking neurons and models specific brain regions. Categories and semantics emerge from the architecture. The way that all these moving parts work together provides insights into both the nature of cognition and brain function." ―Terrence Sejnowski, Professor and Laboratory Head, Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Francis Crick Chair, Salk Institute

"Eliasmith offers a unified theory of cognition that rests on the mechanism of a semantic pointer, namely, a compressed neural representation that can stand as a symbol for a more detailed semantic state or be decompressed to reproduce it, in compositional cognitive processes. Ambitious state-of-the-art modeling grounds the semantic pointer architecture in populations of spiking neurons, providing concrete neural accounts of high-level processes, including attention, learning, memory, syntax, semantics, and reasoning. Along with offering a powerful new approach for integrating cognition and neuroscience, Eliasmith provides detailed technical accounts of his system, with accompanying software that will serve both students and fellow modelers well." ―Lawrence W. Barsalou, Professor, Department of Psychology, Emory University --This text refers to the paperback edition.

About the Author

Chris Eliasmith is Canada Research Chair in Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo.
--This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00HNSNSGK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; Illustrated edition (April 16, 2013)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 16, 2013
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 25659 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 480 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,558,176 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,328 in Neuroscience (Kindle Store)
- #1,749 in Cognitive Psychology (Kindle Store)
- #2,319 in Neuroscience (Books)

Customer Reviews:
27 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Chris Eliasmith

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

27 global ratings

5 star		63%
4 star		20%
3 star		9%
2 star		8%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Tommy Chess Coach

Hands on Neural Sims-- A Roboticists View

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 23, 2013

Verified Purchase

Here's the "real life," most robust and up to date neural cognition text available today, to add supplemental hard science to the numerous softer and more contemplative (less practically sim ready) "Kurzweil" like models, eg: ( How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed .

The book doubles as an "owners manual" for the author's Nengo neuro sim program (meaning Neural ENgineering Objects, not the Japanese era). Videos are available on how the book and system integrate-- check out section 1.5 in Amazon's generous preview peek for the website address. While you're at it, there is a LOT of detail given in this worthwhile preview that will immediately help you determine if this is the book for you.

I design domain specific languages for robotics and am always interested in new and different views of neural vs. semiconductor cognitive sims. Unfortunately to be honest if not crass, most of the books out there today are big on speculation and light on anything you can model. That's where this book shines from my narrow frame-- you can build your own versions of the authors premises and "try" them on what has become the biggest, most active and accessed "online brain sim" on the planet!

Do you have an interest in sims of semantics or perception? My slice is more on "translation" from the compiler side, but this book is wonderful in its coverage of practical aspects of semantics, perception, memory, what the authors call "semantic pointers" and of course the must mention topics today of plasticity and fluid intelligence.

I'll wait for a Neurological researcher to opine on this from the biological side, but for pure "translational" delight between brain and robotic mechanisms, this book can't be beat. It really is the only up to date text on the topic, as extensive brain sims are mostly covered in journals. You should know that the majority of the book IS meant to present a new and coherent theory of brain architecture, but the amount of detail, history, where we have been and where we are going the author covers is worth the price of the book itself, and of course is architecture independent.

As an EE I love math, but if you're math adverse, don't dismiss this, as the author has relegated the most complex math to the appendices. (You can't read neuro without running into differential equations due to the importance of dynamical systems in the models. But from an EE viewpoint, asp and dsp also involve time vs. frequency and we use similar Fourier etc. methods for different reasons on the robotics side).

Very readable, enlightening, and frankly fun, since you really can get hands on with the sims. Highly recommended, but suggest you take advantage of the Amazon preview before investing. Hats off to authors and publishers who have enough pride and confidence in the value of their work to let us have a significant preview like this.

Emailer answer: "What does Eliasmith think of Newell?" A. He mentions him throughout, with respect, but with the objective of bringing Newell's architectures closer to biological underpinnings. SOAR and other production systems are covered, but Chris insists that bringing in dynamic systems is crucial. The example, from my field, is that roboticists use dynamics (PDEs, signal processing, stats) instead of the embedded if-thens of production systems, due to both the "need for speed" in dynamics as well as flexibility. This has the additional benefit of suggesting a more robust model that includes both biology and algorithmic models, and Eliasmith invites both computational Neurology AND psych to converge in testing his new architecture. Emailer's Reference: Unified Theories of Cognition (William James Lectures) .

DO take advantage of the author's/ Amazon's wonderful look inside feature, Dr. Chris even gives an extensive history in that look of what led up to this new model. One interesting gap I found in the otherwise extensive bib (nearly 30 pages) is Bach. You might find his book/dissertation interesting in summary and contrast to many of Chris' unique perspectives: Principles of Synthetic Intelligence PSI: An Architecture of Motivated Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) . Both of course mention Newell extensively.

As a completely unscientific, but fun exercise, whenever I evaluate a title on cognitive architecture, I immediately go to the index and look for the seminal (at least in programming/robotics) word: "recursion." Newell and Chris don't index it specifically, Bach has half a dozen entries and hundreds cross referencing hierarchy and reflection, similar concepts, as do Chris and Newell. If you like or are curious about this concept, ubiquitous in this field but not always re-cognized, you'll greatly enjoy Corballis: The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization . In fact, mathematically, there are recent ("matrix like") theories extending recursion to the mathematics beneath the entire universe, and from a physicist's frame, Dr. Tegmark is one of the first to explore it extensively: Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality .

35 people found this helpful

Helpful

R. Timothy Edwards

This is how books on cognitive science should be written

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 6, 2017

Verified Purchase

Finally, a book about a technical subject that contains all the necessary math to understand what the author is talking about.

There has been a long, long pause between the late-1980s work on neural networks and AI and some grand "unified theory" to connect the two into some reasonable explanation of how the human mind works. This book may not have *the* answer, but it has *an* answer, which is more than anyone else has proposed to date (apart from a slim line of research that is well and thoroughly cited throughout the book), and it certainly points the way forward. I picked up this book on a whim after seeing it mentioned in a quick citation in Dan Dennett's "From Bacteria to Bach and Back", and I must say that I have not enjoyed catching up on cognitive science research so much since reading Rumelhart and McClelland (apart from the book "Spikes", which is so breathtakingly expensive for such a slim volume that I have not obtained a copy for myself). "How to Build a Brain" is, like Parallel Distributed Processing, divided into two main parts, the first to describe the underlying mechanisms, equations, algorithms, and structures; and the second to describe a series of experiments working their way up from the simple to the surprisingly complex.
A shorter third part gives an overview of similar past efforts and compares them to the work of Eliasmith and his students/colleagues. The book contains pointers to the group's website where many (all?) of the software tools used in this research can be found, downloaded, and played with.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Robert Jones

Should airplanes flap their wings?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 20, 2015

Verified Purchase

Eliasmith says "we take our models to be biologically detailed, they should be comparable to biological data....cell physiology, synaptic mechanisms, neurotransmitter transport, neuroanatomy .... reaction times..." page xii. If you are trying to learn how human brains function, warts and all, then I agree. Eliasmith's approach is good cognitive science and even better neuroscience. But if you're doing artificial intelligence then you want to escape biological limits not reproduce them. I certainly don't want an AI with the 7 item limit to short term memory that humans have. Airplanes should not flap their wings. It is now well established that humans are not fully rational. AI can be. The question is just how biologically inspired should our work be.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

I shop

Kindle edition is a pdf/images. Not worth it. Book(content) is good .

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

Kidlle edition of this book if not ebook but a pdf. You cannot read it on phone. It is misleading.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

GIDMEISTER

To build a brain - you better know math

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

This book is full of new ideas - (though all you need to know to understand it is linear algebra and calculus.). Chris Eliasmith and his fellow researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada, have made breakthroughs. And their models use spiking neurons, so they can be tested against the brain, and usually they match what real neurons do. If you want to build a brain - or just want to exercise your own, read this book.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

David W Sullivan

Cool ideas but the software tutorials in this book are useless as is.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

The version of the Nengo GUI depicted in the book is no longer available, and thus the book spends lots of time on tutorials that are now entirely useless. The rest of the book is still worthwhile, and updated tutorials are available online, but I might hold off on buying this book until there's a new version without the obsolete stuff.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Sam Caldwell

Great book.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 2, 2014

Verified Purchase

My company's CEO told me about this book. I'm almost through my first reading, and it is...humbling. This book contains more information in fewer pages than any other book I have read on the subject. It's an academic text, but it is good if you are hard core enough to read it. Now if I could just find the time to build my personal SkyNet machine....

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

julio gonzalez

I have found it to be very useful for my efforts

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 5, 2017

Verified Purchase

I am working on "the problem of consciousness" within a philosophical context. How to build a brain provides strong detailed insight into what consciousness is and how to characterize it. I have found it to be very useful for my efforts.

Buying Options

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the Author

How to Build a Brain: A Neural Architecture for Biological Cognition (Oxford Series on Cognitive Models and Architectures) Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

Customers who read this book also read

Editorial Reviews

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Chris Eliasmith

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.