The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent

Explains what the human mind does when we read a menu, select a wine, sample a dish, argue with a waiter, or recall a favorite meal, and discusses what it means to be intelligent

As artificial intelligence authority Schank tries crab sushi in Tokyo, sips champagne in France and samples the cuisines of Denver, Barcelona, Atlanta and Korea, he uses his culinary experiences to explain short- and long-term memory, the mind's tendency to fill in blanks, how people rely on stereotypes, and such mental processes as inference, expectation, learning and generalization. In an ingenious, gourmandizing romp of a book, Schank, director of Northwestern University's Institute for Learning Sciences, takes hungry minds deep inside the mind's workings. Along the way he offers amusing commentary on the Michelin restaurant guide, Japanese food and "wildly overpriced" wines in fancy U.S. restaurants. Readers meet CHEF, a computer program that creates recipes; FRUMP, a program that reads and summarizes newspaper stories; and JUDGE, a program that metes out judicial sentences for crimes.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Another helping of wit and wisdom from the ever-entertaining author of Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory (1990), etc. Here, Schank, director of the Institute for the Learning Science at Northwestern Univ., uses tales of gourmet dinners he has known to evoke the workings of human memory, the underpinnings of the learning process, and the meaning of true intelligence. ``I love to eat and I love to think,'' claims the author, and since he also enjoys combining unpaid pleasures (eating well) with paid ones (writing books about thinking), his lively discussion of the learning process is filtered through tales of his recent sabbatical in Paris, during which he attempted to experience the best of French cuisine and refine his knowledge of good wines. Such a gustatory adventure provides many excellent examples of the processes by which humans gain knowledge: stereotyping, prioritizing, and ``default filling'' (used, for example, to store ``scripts'' for ordering food at a Burger King and at a three-star French restaurant) free up the brain for more efficient thinking; stymied expectations (here, regarding an old Bordeaux that proves nearly undrinkable) lead to learning; firsthand experience (particularly where good food is involved) leads to learning far more efficiently than the rote transferral of facts. A teacher's role, then, Schank concludes, is not to stuff students with already digested facts, but to arrange for them to experience knowledge firsthand, and motivate them to refine that knowledge on their own. In this, Schank himself rates three stars. A tasty and substantial intellectual treat. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A connoisseur of food and wine, Schank is also director of Northwestern University's Institute for Learning Sciences and author of Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory ( LJ 12/90). The pursuit of his gustatory pastime serves as a paradigm to illustrate a very credible theory of how the mind works, how we understand, remember, and think. This intriguing model of the thought process involves such elements as prediction, expectation failure, case-based reasoning, and wondering. Readers who can overlook a tendency to ramble and a certain amount of arrogance on the part of the author will be rewarded with a lucid and fascinating theory of intelligence. Schank's highly unusual yet effective approach should encourage thought, lively discussion, and perhaps the sampling of a few bottles of old Bordeaux.
- Laurie Bartolini, Lincoln Lib., Springfield, Ill.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.