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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