Models of the Mind, Grace Lindsay
Models of the Mind, Grace Lindsay
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Models of the Mind
How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain

Author: Grace Lindsay

Narrator: Wendy Tremont King

Unabridged: 13 hr

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/04/2021

Synopsis

Grace Lindsay reveals the value of describing the machinery of neuroscience using the elegant language of mathematics.

The brain is made up of 85 billion neurons, which are connected by over 100 trillion synapses. For over a century, a diverse array of researchers have been trying to find a language that can be used to capture the essence of what these neurons do and how they communicate—and how those communications create thoughts, perceptions and actions. The language they were looking for was mathematics, and we would not be able to understand the brain as we do today without it.

In Models of the Mind, author and computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed scientists to understand and describe many of the brain's processes, including decision-making, sensory processing, quantifying memory, and more. She introduces listeners to the most important concepts in modern neuroscience, and highlights the tensions that arise when bringing the abstract world of mathematical modelling into contact with the messy details of biology.

About Grace Lindsay

Grace Lindsay is a computational neuroscientist currently living in London. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at Columbia University, where her research focused on building mathematical models of how the brain controls its own sensory processing. Before that, she earned a bachelor's degree in neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh and received a research fellowship to study at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Freiburg, Germany. She was also awarded a Google PhD Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience in 2016, and has spoken at several international conferences. She is also the producer and cohost of Unsupervised Thinking, a podcast covering topics in neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Brian

This is a remarkable book. When Ernest Rutherford made his infamous remark about science being either physics or stamp collecting, it was, of course, an exaggeration. Yet it was based on a point - biology in particular was primarily about collecting information on what happened rather than explainin......more

Goodreads review by Ali

Story of collaboration of neuroscience and artificial intelligence. I concluded that the brain got many specialized modules that were made by natural selection specifically for our survival in our environment. Maybe there is no general intelligence algorithm, instead a very specialized structure, for......more

Goodreads review by Nguyễn

The author provides high-level descriptions of almost every family of models one would find in an introductory course in computational neuroscience, and she does so in such a clear and clean writing style. Accompanying each model is a vivid historical account of how it came about and, in a broader s......more

Goodreads review by Lourens

Accessible and easy to read introduction to the applications of a wide array of mathematical models in neuroscience. I had a relatively easy time with the mathematical concepts as most of them I've seen before in some form, but Lindsay does a great job giving intuitive explanations anyway. Especially......more

Goodreads review by Mendoza

Though it's elegantly written and impressive in its breadth, this book didn't quite completely work for me. It attempts to do many things at once and ends up doing all of them passably. In a nutshell, it is a history of the various ways in which mathematics are used in modeling different aspects of......more

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