The Metaphorical Brain 2 Neural Networks and Beyond "This book combines two exciting quests, the quest to understand the workings of the human brain and the quest to build intelligent machines. It shows how each quest can provide insights vital to the success of the other. It develops basic ideas about neural networks, both artificial and biological, and introduces the language of schema theory to describe the distributed interactions that underlie intelligence in the brain of human, animal or robot. It reaffirms the paradigm of highly distributed cooperative computation, showing how it not only deepens our understanding of human mind/brain, but also catalyzes the development of a new generation of computing machinery. The book presents many new results, both from my own group and elsewhere, that have enriched that paradigm during the last fifteen years.…The book as a whole, although by no means light reading, should be accessible overall to anyone who reads Scientific American; but it is hoped that much of the material merits the attention not only of ‘the intelligent laymen’ but also of experts and serious students of artificial intelligence, neural networks, robotics, cognitive science, or neuroscience." —From the Author’s Preface