Newspaper and magazine articles described the ENIAC as a “giant electronic brain,” a “robot brain,” an “automatic brain,” and a “brain machine.” But before long, the analogy got turned around. It became a commonplace that the brain is like a computer. Indeed, the “cognitive revolution” that would sweep through American universities in the 1950s and 1960s was premised on the belief that the brain could be understood as a flesh-and-blood computing machine. The first generation of cognitive scientists “took seriously the idea that the mind is a kind of computer,” notes Brown University professor
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