The Mind Is a Search Engine

As metaphors for the mind go, one researcher at Stanford says our brains function much more like search engines than computers. We are more probabilistic than deterministic, she says. “What if—say—language is more like a search engine? This is the subversive and potentially revolutionary idea posed by Michael Ramscar in this month’s edition of Cognitive Science. A search engine is a probabilistic, predictive learning machine. Unlike spreadsheets, search engines do not engage with their input in a determinate, preprogrammed manner. Instead of rigidly structuring incoming information according to some prefabricated set of rules, they discover structure within information.”