Amosov: Modeling of Thinking and the Mind
In 1965 the Kyiv publisher Naukova Dumka issued the surgeon and cybernetician Nikolai Amosov's book on modelling thinking and the mind, in Russian, 302 pages, in 12,000 copies; in 1967 it appeared in English as Modeling of Thinking and the Mind. The book describes the cortex of the brain as 'a powerful modeling apparatus' with temporary and permanent models.
Why it matters
Kyiv had a programmatic book on modelling thought: in its conclusion the author names heuristic modelling of the mind in machines as the most important direction, with artificial nerve networks as one of the parallel paths. The later TAIR of his department stands in this direction. This is an editorial assessment.
Of the Kyiv edition of 1965 the title page and its verso were read, in a scan: Naukova Dumka, Kyiv, 1965; printed by decision of the editorial board for popular-science literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR; signed to press on 19 August 1965; 12,000 copies at 38 kopecks, printed in Lviv. The publisher's annotation says the author proposes an information hypothesis of the programmes of human mental activity (emotions, consciousness, the subconscious, will, the creative process) and outlines ways of modelling them on computers, and addresses the book to people in cybernetics, medicine and psychology and to a wider readership. The length, 302 pages, is from the Library of Congress catalogue. The content is from the first pages of chapters of the English translation (New York, Spartan; London, Macmillan, 1967; xiii, 192 pp.), made by Leo Finegold of San Diego Mesa College for Scripta Technica, with Lawrence J. Fogel as translation editor. Chapter 5 describes temporary models, in which the external world is reflected briefly, and permanent models, permanent memory. In the conclusion the author calls the book 'nothing more than a popular introduction' and lists four types of model that can be built in machines, from hierarchical information processing to 'conscious and subconscious'. What the record does not claim: that the book already describes the system of reinforcement and inhibition on which TAIR stands, which the pages read do not contain; where the author worked according to the edition itself: its title page and verso call him a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences and a Lenin Prize laureate and name no institution, and the rest of the 1965 edition was not read.