Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition

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Presidential Lecturer



Cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter delivered the second talk in the Presidential Lecture series to an overflowing audience in Cubberly Auditorium. Students crowded the stairs and spilled onto the stage to listen to his lecture, which examined the mind's capacity to categorize mental representations by their "essences" and to make connections between them. The author of eight major books, Hofstadter is best known for his first, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (1979), which garnered the 1980 Pulitzer Prize.