IGX

Surprisingly, I had never heard of Edward de Bono before recently reading a review of his 1969 book Mechanism of Mind. I now of am two opinions on him and the book.

First, I found the book fantastic as a mechanical model of the mind. Even more blown away seeing how this was written in the 60's. In short, he makes a great general case that the mind works only as a somewhat crude memory system, and that alone brings out traits and behaviors we all recognize. There is no designer and no director, no "you", in there but a completely passive, self-organizing system. That all sounds haughty but the book isn't too hard of a read. The culmination of the book is that you can work with the limitations of this system and practice a "new" type of thinking - Lateral thinking.

However, after I read the book, I wanted to hear how he has fleshed out this theory of mind as a passive memory surface. Instead, what I found was a fucking cavalcade of self-help books, ever since 1970. They're all based on creativity and lateral thinking to solve problems. Such a narrow and disappointing field, if you ask me, based on the initial theorems. Makes me wonder now, if he never could get past the limitations of his original theory and just went off to make money. No problem there, but I wanted more.

Overall, though, I found it an excellent read, and would highly recommend it, even if only to see things from a different perspective and to make you wonder if there's no "self" inside.

I'll just save you the trouble and tell you right now that nobody is going to read that book.

Bux. Track this proto cocksucker down and slap his face.

BucketHead wrote:First, I found the book fantastic as a mechanical model of the mind. Even more blown away seeing how this was written in the 60's. In short, he makes a great general case that the mind works only as a somewhat crude memory system, and that alone brings out traits and behaviors we all recognize. There is no designer and no director, no "you", in there but a completely passive, self-organizing system.

You'd probably really enjoy On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. The book puts forward a similar model but with lots more science behind it due to the increase in research, yet it is still readable.

One of the interesting arguments he gives is of recognizing a cat in a picture, or catching a ball thrown at you. Based on the time to do so noted from experiments versus how fast signals travel in the noggin, a signal can only step through a 100 neurons max. So there really can't be any computation going on, it has to be pattern matching from memory.

The wikipedia page doesn't do it justice. Book is 250 pages or so. In his bibliography he doesn't reference DeBono, I noticed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence