Calculus of Thought

Preface

A Personal Perspective

I first heard the phrase Calculus of Thought as a second year graduate student in 1981 when I took a seminar called Brain and Behavior taught by our professor James Davis at the University of New Hampshire. He gave us a thorough grounding in the cognitive neuroscience of that day, and he spent significant time on various models of neural computation. The goal of cognitive research in neuroscience, he constantly reminded us, was to discover the neural calculus, which he took to be a complete and unifying understanding of how the brain performs computation in diverse functions such as coordinated motor action, perception, learning and memory, decision making, and causal reasoning. He suggested that if we had such ...