Srini Narayanan

Srini Narayanan is the Indian-American cognitive scientist who completed his doctorate under George Lakoff at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, developing the neural theory of language that provided computational models of how image schemas could be implemented in structured connectionist networks. He spent two decades as a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute before joining Google, where he rose to senior research director at DeepMind — a position from which he helps build the systems his theoretical work scrutinizes. His 2025 co-authorship with Lakoff of The Neural Mind placed the embodied-cognition argument inside rather than outside the AI field, giving the book's central claim — that deep-learning AI is categorically different from embodied mind — the weight of a senior practitioner who knows the systems he is arguing about.