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

by Roger C. Schank

Dust jacket notes: "Roger Schank loves to eat and drink. He also loves to think about eating and drinking. Most of all, he loves to think about thinking about eating and drinking. And in The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671678558
• ISBN13: 9780671678555
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Summit Books
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 2.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Wondering starts the process of learning.

In the Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, Roger Shank uses his love of great food to teach us about how human beings learn and think, primarily through the process of remembering and indexing. I think the best way to learn what a non-fiction book is about is through a series of quotes taken from the book. If everything happens the way you expected it to happen, you may well be happy, but you won't learn a thing. To learn we need expectation failure. Further, we need expectation failure we can cope with. The failures have to be small rather than large. (p.153) All important knowledge is in the form of expectations. (p.50) Expectations come from prior generalizations. (p.155) "We must evaluate our experiences in terms of what we can learn from them in order to learn from them. Remembering everything actually prevents you from concentrating on what can be learned... We have a major problem, therefore, when we begin to learn something new. We must alter our knowledge base by adding what we are now processing to what we already know. But where exactly do we add the new information? Where does a new episode belong? This question is not frivolous, although it is not one that any of us is prepared to answer consciously. To give you a sense of the problem imagine that I have been presented with a long-forgotten Minnesota establishment as a remembrance of the evening, and that, it so happened, I have a copy of the menu of every meal that I have ever eaten. Imagine that I live in a house full of menus. Where should I put the Minnesota menu? I could choose to file all my menus by date. In that case, the filing would be easy, but the retrieval would be difficult. I would never be able to find this meal unless I knew the date, but I might want to remember a meal by some other more significant aspect associated with it. The food, for example. Suppose that I meet Jean-Francois, and he happens to mention the dessert we ate at Jamin. I immediately rush home to my file of menus to find the one from the particular night at Jamin to which he is referring. But where do I look? If I have filed all the menus by their dates, I will need to recall the date of the meal in question to retrieve the right menu. Well, it was in March of last year; perhaps I can find it this way. But, then he mentions that he thought that the dessert at Zur Trabe was better. Oh my, when was that? A couple of years ago, but I don't even know what time of year. It was on a business trip, and that could have taken place at anytime. I remember the weather was cool, but that just means it wasn't the dead of winter or the middle of summer. No this cannot be a good filing system, but what would be a better one be? How about if I put all the menus from great meals in one cabinet, filed alphabetically by restaurant name? And how about if I put all the pretty good meals in another cabinet, but this time filed by location? This way, if someone asked me the name of a great restaurant in Florida, I c