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The Mechanism of Mind
De Bono's 1969 treatise describing the brain as a <em>self-organizing information system</em> — three decades before 'neural network' entered popular vocabulary, fifty years before large language models reproduced the dynamics at silicon scale.
The Mechanism of Mind is the theoretical foundation on which de Bono's entire body of practical work rests. Published in 1969, drawing on his training in medicine, psychology, and physiology, the book proposed a model of neural information processing in which incoming experience organizes itself into asymmetric patterns through the brain's inherent properties — without any external organizer directing the process. The patterns channel subsequent experience along the paths previous experience carved. The model anticipated with striking precision the computational architecture of modern artificial neural networks and explained, in advance, both their extraordinary capabilities and their structural limitations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book was largely ignored by computer science at the time of publication. Artificial intelligence in 1969 was dominated by symbolic approaches — rule-based systems, logical programming, explicit representations — and the idea that intelligence could emerge from self-organizing processes without explicit design was considered at best speculative, at worst pseudoscientific. It would take until the 1980s,
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