Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind

  • Gary Marcus | Professor of Psychology, NYU and Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center

The mind is not an elegantly designed organ but a “kluge”, a clumsy, cobbled together contraption: think duct tape, not supercomputer. In a tour through some fundamental areas of human experience-memory, belief, decision making and happiness—it is revealed the many ways our minds fall short. Why is eyewitness testimony so fallible? Why do we throw good money after bad and why do we vote against our own interests? There are ways to “outwit our inner kluge” such as: consider alternative explanations, make contingency plans, and beware the personal, vivid anecdote. While our minds are haphazard and undirected, we can make a case for the power and usefulness of imperfection.

Speaker Details

Gary Marcus is a research psychologist whose work focuses on language and the mind. In high school, after creating a computer program that translated Latin into English he became convinced that one cannot build programs within machines that understand language without understanding how people can understand language. This led to his interest and continuing work in cognitive science and human reasoning, and graduate work at MIT under linguist Steven Pinker. His earlier books include The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science and The Birth of the Mind: How a Tiny Number of Genes Creates the Complexities of Human Thought.

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