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Pulitzer Winner Shares Theory on Thinking

Douglas Hofstadter is a Pulitzer Prize winner and noted scholar. He shared his theories on the make up of cognitive thinking Thursday night.

"The entire point of this talk is that thinking at the tiniest and largest levels … is analogies," he said. "The way in which we use any words is an analogy."

Listen to Hofstadter’s complete talk in this Podcast.

The Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University spent most of his hour-plus lecture sharing examples with the more than 50 people gathered in Hays Hall. Nearly 20 current Wabash faculty members, from all disciplines, were in attendance.

His 2007 book, I Am a Strange Loop, follows his work on how analogy making lies at the base of all human thought. He delved into that area in Analogy as the Core of Cognition.

His best-known work, for which he won a 1980 Pulitzer Prize, is Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.