What Is Connectionism?

Dr. Stephen Grossberg is the founder of computational neuroscience and creator of Adaptive Resonance Theory, one of the most important and misunderstood breakthroughs in brain science. Often called the Einstein of the Mind, he wrote the first neural network equations at just 17 years old, laying the mathematical foundations for modern AI decades before computers could even measure the brain.Grossberg’s ideas have powered technologies at DARPA, Boeing, and even the NSA, yet he claims to be the victim of one of the largest plagiarism scandals in scientific history, involving several Nobel Prize winners who, he says, built their reputations on his work. Now in his eighties, he’s breaking his silence on the real story behind the algorithms that shaped both human and machine intelligence.

Expect to learn how Adaptive Resonance Theory explains how we learn new things without forgetting the old, why Grossberg believes modern AI and large language models like ChatGPT are fundamentally broken, the neuroscience of consciousness and the six resonances that give rise to awareness, why attention and emotion are inseparable, how perception is shaped by feedback rather than feedforward processing, what “surface shroud resonance” reveals about the feeling of seeing, and why the true brain-inspired future of AI might depend on ideas the world ignored for half a century.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Forgotten Father of Artificial Intelligence

03:15 Writing the First Neural Network Equations at 17

08:10 Modeling the Mind Before Brain Scanners Existed

13:24 How Adaptive Resonance Theory Changed Everything

18:37 The Biggest Plagiarism Scandal in Science?

24:58 How His Equations Were Used by DARPA, Boeing, and the NSA

31:20 Why Modern AI Still Gets the Brain Wrong

38:16 The Fatal Flaw Inside Deep Learning and ChatGPT

45:42 How the Brain Learns Without Forgetting

52:49 Consciousness as Resonance — The Feedback Loop That Feels

59:33 The Six Resonances That Create Awareness

01:06:57 The Thanksgiving Turkey Experiment Explained

01:14:40 The Emotional Side of Intelligence and Consciousness

01:22:19 Building a Brain from Silicon — Vision, Emotion, and Meaning

01:30:44 The Mind–Body Problem and the Limits of Equations

01:38:12 What Science Still Can’t Explain About Experience

01:45:26 Can Machines Ever Truly Be Conscious?

01:52:48 The Legacy of the Real Father of AI

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