Dennis Garlick

Dennis Garlick

University of Sydney

"Providing the missing link between brain research and human intelligence"

The last few decades have been characterized by major advances in our understanding of brain function and computation. However, there is also a feeling that this work has yet to fulfil its promise in enabling us to understand how we are able to demonstrate human intelligence. It will be argued that abstraction is critical for understanding human intelligence, and that abstraction occurs through a learning process that is present in the brain over childhood. Exposure to many specific instances of the general principles that structure the environment would allow the elements that vary across instances to cancel each other out. This would lead to abstract representations that are context independent. These representations can then be applied to both previously experienced instances involving these principles, and also new instances that possess these principles but where the context is different. In this way, childhood experience is able to generalize to many more situations than would be suggested based on a child's concrete experiences alone, and enables humans to perform successfully in seemingly novel situations. The challenge is to understand how this learning process differs from other learning processes in the brain.