BIO
Michael L Anderson is the Rotman Professor in Philosophy of Science at Western University in Ontario. He is a core member of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the Brain and Mind Institute.
Anderson earned a B.S. with honors in pre-medical studies at the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University (where he was a Sterling Prize Fellow), and did his post-doctoral fellowship in computer science at the University of Maryland. In 2012, he was selected to be a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
He is the author of After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain (MIT Press), along with over one hundred publications in philosophy, theoretical and computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. His work has appeared in such journals as Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Connection Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, NeuroImage, The Neuroscientist, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy Compass, and Synthese.
Anderson earned a B.S. with honors in pre-medical studies at the University of Notre Dame, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University (where he was a Sterling Prize Fellow), and did his post-doctoral fellowship in computer science at the University of Maryland. In 2012, he was selected to be a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
He is the author of After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain (MIT Press), along with over one hundred publications in philosophy, theoretical and computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. His work has appeared in such journals as Artificial Intelligence, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Connection Science, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, NeuroImage, The Neuroscientist, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy Compass, and Synthese.
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I have also long been a proponent of an evolutionarily inflected version of embodied cognition, the first premise of which is that the brain evolved to control action, not to represent to the world. I believe this realization should change how we think about the brain, and how we study it. After Phrenology was my first
attempt to systematically investigate these implications of re-use and embodiment. |
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publications
Monographs
Anderson, M.L. (2014). After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1997). Content and Comportment: On Embodiment and the Epistemic Availability of the World. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Edited collections
Anderson, M.L. and Oates, T. eds. (2005). Metacognition in Computation: Papers from the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium. (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. ed. (1996). The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Journal articles and book chapters
Anderson, M.L. (2017). Of Bayes and bullets: An embodied, situated, targeting-based account of predictive processing. In: T. K. Metzinger & Wanja Wiese, eds. Philosophy and Predictive Processing, ch. 4. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
Anderson, M.L. & Chemero, A. (2017). The brain evolved to guide action. In S. V. Shepherd (ed.), The Wiley handbook of evolutionary neuroscience, pp. 1-20. (London: Wiley-Blackwell).
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Précis of After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000631, e120
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Reply to reviewers: Reuse, embodied interactivity, and the emerging paradigm shift in the human neurosciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000631, e120
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Neural reuse and the in principle limitations on reproducibility in cognitive neuroscience. In: Harald Atmanspacher and Sabine Maasen (eds.). Reproducibility – Principles, practices, problems. (New York: Wiley).
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Neural reuse in the evolution and development of the brain. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 58(S4): 3-6.
Anderson, M.L. (2015). Beyond componential constitution in the brain: Starburst amacrine cells and enabling constraints. In: T.K. Metzinger and J.M. Windt, (eds.) OpenMIND (Munich: Barbara Wengler Stiftung).
Anderson, M.L. (2015). Mining the brain for a new taxonomy of mind. Philosophy Compass, 10(1): 68-77. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. & Finlay, B. (2014). Allocating structure to function: the strong links between neuroplasticity and natural selection. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7: 918.
Uddin, L., Kinnison, J., Pessoa, L. & Anderson, M.L. (2014). Beyond the tripartite cognition-emotion-interoception model of the human insular cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(1):16-27.
Anderson, M.L., Kinnison, J. & Pessoa, L. (2013). Describing functional diversity of brain regions and brain networks. NeuroImage, 73: 50-58.
Penner-Wilger, M. & Anderson, M.L. (2013). The relation between finger gnosis and mathematical ability: Why redeployment of neural circuits best explains the finding. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 4: 877.
Anderson, M.L. & Penner-Wilger, M. (2013). Neural reuse in the evolution and development of the brain: Evidence for developmental homology? Developmental Psychobiology, 55(1): 42-51.
Anderson, M.L., Gomaa, W., Grant, J. & Perlis, D. (2013). An approach to human-level commonsense reasoning. In: K. Tanaka, F. Berto, E. Mares, and F. Paoli (eds.). Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, pages 201-222. (Dordrecht: Springer).
Anderson, M.L., Richardson, M. & Chemero, A. (2012). Eroding the boundaries of cognition: Implications of embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(4): 717-30.
Schmill, M.D., Anderson, M.L., Fults, S., Josyula, D., Oates, T., Perlis, D., *Shahri, H., *Wilson, S. & *Wright, D. (2011). The Metacognitive Loop and reasoning about anomalies. In: M. Cox and A. Raja, (eds.). Metareasoning: Thinking about thinking, pages 183-98. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Anderson, M.L. (2010). Neural reuse: A fundamental organizational principle of the brain. (Target article) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4): 245-66.
Anderson, M.L. (2010). Cortex in context: Reply to commentaries. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4): 294-313.
Anderson, M.L., *Brumbaugh, J. & *Şuben, A. (2010). Investigating functional cooperation in the human brain using simple graph-theoretic methods. In: A. Chaovalitwongse, P.M. Pardalos, and P. Xanthopoulos, (eds.). Computational Neuroscience, (pp. 31-42). Springer.
Anderson, M.L. (2009). What mindedness is. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 5(4): 1-12.
Anderson, M.L. & Chemero, T. (2009). Affordances and intentionality: Reply to Roberts. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 30(4): 301-12.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). Circuit sharing and the implementation of intelligent systems. Connection Science, 20(4): 239-51.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). On the grounds of x-grounded cognition. In: Paco Calvo and Tony Gomila, eds. Elsevier Handbook of Embodied Cognition (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 423-35.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). Evolution, embodiment and the nature of the mind. In: B. Hardy-Vallee & N. Payette, eds. Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 15-28. (ER)
Anderson, M.L., Fults, S., Josyula, D.P., Oates, T., Perlis, D., Schmill, M.D., and *Wilson, S. (2008). A self-help guide for autonomous systems. AI Magazine, 29(2): 67-76. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. & Rosenberg, G. (2008). Content and action: The guidance theory of representation. In: D. Smith (ed) Evolutionary Biology and the Central Problems of Cognitive Science, a special issue of Journal of Mind and Behavior, 29(1-2): 55-86. (PR)
Chaovalitwongse, A., Suharitdamrong, W., Liu, C-C., & Anderson, M.L. (2008). Brain network analysis of seizure evolution. Annales Zoologici Fennici, 45(5): 402-14. (PR)
Anderson, M.L., *Gomaa, W., Grant, J. & Perlis, D. (2008). Active logic semantics for a single agent in a static world. Artificial Intelligence, 172: 1045-63. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of cognitive operations. Synthese, 159(3): 329-345. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). Evolution of cognitive function via redeployment of brain areas. The Neuroscientist, 13(1): 13-21. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). The massive redeployment hypothesis and the functional topography of the brain. Philosophical Psychology, 21(2): 143-174.
Anderson, M.L. (2007). How to study the mind: An introduction to embodied cognition. In F.Santoianni and C. Sabatano, eds. Brain Development in Learning Environments: Embodied and Perceptual Advancements. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 65-82.
Anderson, M.L. & Oates, T. (2007). A review of recent research in metareasoning and metalearning. AI Magazine, 28(1): 7-16.
Anderson, M.L., Oates, T., *Chong, Y. & Perils, D. (2006). The metacognitive loop I: Enhancing reinforcement learning with metacognitive monitoring and control for improved perturbation tolerance. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 18(3): 387-411.
Anderson, M.L. (2006). Cognitive science and epistemic openness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5(2): 125-54.
Anderson, M.L. & Perlis, D. (2005). The roots of self-awareness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(3): 297-333.
Anderson, M.L. & Perlis, D.R. (2005). Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness. Journal of Logic and Computation 15(1): 21-40.
*Josyula, D., Anderson, M.L. and Perlis, D. (2005). Metacognition for dropping and reconsidering intentions. In: M. Anderson and T. Oates, eds. Metacognition in Computation: Papers from 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium. Technical Report SS-05-04 (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press).
Anderson, M.L. (2003). Embodied cognition: A field guide. Artificial Intelligence 149(1): 91-130.
Anderson, M.L. (2003). Representations, symbols and embodiment. Artificial Intelligence 149(1): 151-6.
Anderson, M.L. and Perlis, D. R. (2002). Symbol systems. In L. Nadel, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, vol. 4 (London: Macmillan Publishers), pp. 281-287.
Traum, D., Andersen, C., *Chong, Y., *Josyula, D., O’Donovan-Anderson, M., *Okamoto, Y., *Purang, K. & Perlis, D. (1999). Representations of dialogue state for domain and task independent meta-dialogue. Electronic Transactions on AI 3: 125-52.
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1996). Science & things: On scientific method as embodied access to the world. In M. O’Donovan-Anderson, ed. The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1996). Wittgenstein and Rousseau on the context of justification. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22(3): 75-92.
Anderson, M.L. (2014). After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1997). Content and Comportment: On Embodiment and the Epistemic Availability of the World. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Edited collections
Anderson, M.L. and Oates, T. eds. (2005). Metacognition in Computation: Papers from the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium. (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. ed. (1996). The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
Journal articles and book chapters
Anderson, M.L. (2017). Of Bayes and bullets: An embodied, situated, targeting-based account of predictive processing. In: T. K. Metzinger & Wanja Wiese, eds. Philosophy and Predictive Processing, ch. 4. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
Anderson, M.L. & Chemero, A. (2017). The brain evolved to guide action. In S. V. Shepherd (ed.), The Wiley handbook of evolutionary neuroscience, pp. 1-20. (London: Wiley-Blackwell).
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Précis of After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000631, e120
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Reply to reviewers: Reuse, embodied interactivity, and the emerging paradigm shift in the human neurosciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 39. doi:10.1017/S0140525X15000631, e120
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Neural reuse and the in principle limitations on reproducibility in cognitive neuroscience. In: Harald Atmanspacher and Sabine Maasen (eds.). Reproducibility – Principles, practices, problems. (New York: Wiley).
Anderson, M.L. (2016). Neural reuse in the evolution and development of the brain. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 58(S4): 3-6.
Anderson, M.L. (2015). Beyond componential constitution in the brain: Starburst amacrine cells and enabling constraints. In: T.K. Metzinger and J.M. Windt, (eds.) OpenMIND (Munich: Barbara Wengler Stiftung).
Anderson, M.L. (2015). Mining the brain for a new taxonomy of mind. Philosophy Compass, 10(1): 68-77. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. & Finlay, B. (2014). Allocating structure to function: the strong links between neuroplasticity and natural selection. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7: 918.
Uddin, L., Kinnison, J., Pessoa, L. & Anderson, M.L. (2014). Beyond the tripartite cognition-emotion-interoception model of the human insular cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 26(1):16-27.
Anderson, M.L., Kinnison, J. & Pessoa, L. (2013). Describing functional diversity of brain regions and brain networks. NeuroImage, 73: 50-58.
Penner-Wilger, M. & Anderson, M.L. (2013). The relation between finger gnosis and mathematical ability: Why redeployment of neural circuits best explains the finding. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 4: 877.
Anderson, M.L. & Penner-Wilger, M. (2013). Neural reuse in the evolution and development of the brain: Evidence for developmental homology? Developmental Psychobiology, 55(1): 42-51.
Anderson, M.L., Gomaa, W., Grant, J. & Perlis, D. (2013). An approach to human-level commonsense reasoning. In: K. Tanaka, F. Berto, E. Mares, and F. Paoli (eds.). Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, pages 201-222. (Dordrecht: Springer).
Anderson, M.L., Richardson, M. & Chemero, A. (2012). Eroding the boundaries of cognition: Implications of embodiment. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(4): 717-30.
Schmill, M.D., Anderson, M.L., Fults, S., Josyula, D., Oates, T., Perlis, D., *Shahri, H., *Wilson, S. & *Wright, D. (2011). The Metacognitive Loop and reasoning about anomalies. In: M. Cox and A. Raja, (eds.). Metareasoning: Thinking about thinking, pages 183-98. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Anderson, M.L. (2010). Neural reuse: A fundamental organizational principle of the brain. (Target article) Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4): 245-66.
Anderson, M.L. (2010). Cortex in context: Reply to commentaries. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(4): 294-313.
Anderson, M.L., *Brumbaugh, J. & *Şuben, A. (2010). Investigating functional cooperation in the human brain using simple graph-theoretic methods. In: A. Chaovalitwongse, P.M. Pardalos, and P. Xanthopoulos, (eds.). Computational Neuroscience, (pp. 31-42). Springer.
Anderson, M.L. (2009). What mindedness is. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 5(4): 1-12.
Anderson, M.L. & Chemero, T. (2009). Affordances and intentionality: Reply to Roberts. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 30(4): 301-12.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). Circuit sharing and the implementation of intelligent systems. Connection Science, 20(4): 239-51.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). On the grounds of x-grounded cognition. In: Paco Calvo and Tony Gomila, eds. Elsevier Handbook of Embodied Cognition (Amsterdam: Elsevier), pp. 423-35.
Anderson, M.L. (2008). Evolution, embodiment and the nature of the mind. In: B. Hardy-Vallee & N. Payette, eds. Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 15-28. (ER)
Anderson, M.L., Fults, S., Josyula, D.P., Oates, T., Perlis, D., Schmill, M.D., and *Wilson, S. (2008). A self-help guide for autonomous systems. AI Magazine, 29(2): 67-76. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. & Rosenberg, G. (2008). Content and action: The guidance theory of representation. In: D. Smith (ed) Evolutionary Biology and the Central Problems of Cognitive Science, a special issue of Journal of Mind and Behavior, 29(1-2): 55-86. (PR)
Chaovalitwongse, A., Suharitdamrong, W., Liu, C-C., & Anderson, M.L. (2008). Brain network analysis of seizure evolution. Annales Zoologici Fennici, 45(5): 402-14. (PR)
Anderson, M.L., *Gomaa, W., Grant, J. & Perlis, D. (2008). Active logic semantics for a single agent in a static world. Artificial Intelligence, 172: 1045-63. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). Massive redeployment, exaptation, and the functional integration of cognitive operations. Synthese, 159(3): 329-345. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). Evolution of cognitive function via redeployment of brain areas. The Neuroscientist, 13(1): 13-21. (PR)
Anderson, M.L. (2007). The massive redeployment hypothesis and the functional topography of the brain. Philosophical Psychology, 21(2): 143-174.
Anderson, M.L. (2007). How to study the mind: An introduction to embodied cognition. In F.Santoianni and C. Sabatano, eds. Brain Development in Learning Environments: Embodied and Perceptual Advancements. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press), pp. 65-82.
Anderson, M.L. & Oates, T. (2007). A review of recent research in metareasoning and metalearning. AI Magazine, 28(1): 7-16.
Anderson, M.L., Oates, T., *Chong, Y. & Perils, D. (2006). The metacognitive loop I: Enhancing reinforcement learning with metacognitive monitoring and control for improved perturbation tolerance. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 18(3): 387-411.
Anderson, M.L. (2006). Cognitive science and epistemic openness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5(2): 125-54.
Anderson, M.L. & Perlis, D. (2005). The roots of self-awareness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4(3): 297-333.
Anderson, M.L. & Perlis, D.R. (2005). Logic, self-awareness and self-improvement: The metacognitive loop and the problem of brittleness. Journal of Logic and Computation 15(1): 21-40.
*Josyula, D., Anderson, M.L. and Perlis, D. (2005). Metacognition for dropping and reconsidering intentions. In: M. Anderson and T. Oates, eds. Metacognition in Computation: Papers from 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium. Technical Report SS-05-04 (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press).
Anderson, M.L. (2003). Embodied cognition: A field guide. Artificial Intelligence 149(1): 91-130.
Anderson, M.L. (2003). Representations, symbols and embodiment. Artificial Intelligence 149(1): 151-6.
Anderson, M.L. and Perlis, D. R. (2002). Symbol systems. In L. Nadel, et al., eds. Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, vol. 4 (London: Macmillan Publishers), pp. 281-287.
Traum, D., Andersen, C., *Chong, Y., *Josyula, D., O’Donovan-Anderson, M., *Okamoto, Y., *Purang, K. & Perlis, D. (1999). Representations of dialogue state for domain and task independent meta-dialogue. Electronic Transactions on AI 3: 125-52.
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1996). Science & things: On scientific method as embodied access to the world. In M. O’Donovan-Anderson, ed. The Incorporated Self: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
O’Donovan-Anderson, M. (1996). Wittgenstein and Rousseau on the context of justification. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22(3): 75-92.