Stephen Grossberg

Stephen Grossberg
Grossberg in July, 2016.
Born	(1939-12-31) 31 December 1939 (age 77) New York City, NY
Nationality	United States

Stephen Grossberg (born December 31, 1939) is a cognitive scientist, theoretical and computational psychologist, neuroscientist, mathematician, biomedical engineer, and neuromorphic technologist. He is the Wang Professor of Cognitive and Neural Systems and a Professor of Mathematics, Psychology, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.

Grossberg first lived in Woodside, Queens, in New York City. His father died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was one year old. He moved with his mother and older brother, Mitchell, to Jackson Heights, Queens, at five years of age when his mother remarried. The New York City subway system enabled him, along with thousands of other students, to attend Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan after passing its competitive entrance exam. He graduated first in his class from Stuyvesant in 1957.

His work on developing models that link brains to minds began unexpectedly when he took the introductory psychology course as a freshman at Dartmouth College in 1957. When he was exposed there to classical human and animal data about learning, the philosophical paradoxes that were implicit in these data triggered an intellectual inquiry that led him to introduce, during his freshman year, the modern paradigm of using nonlinear differential equations with which to describe neural networks that model brain dynamics, as well as the basic equations that many scientists use for this purpose today (see Research).

Grossberg knew no neuroscience when he derived his first neural models in 1957-58 from a real-time analysis of behavioral learning data. This behavioral derivation led to neural network models, often called the Additive and Shunting models today (see Research), that include cell bodies, axons, and synapses in which short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) traces have a natural interpretation in terms of neural potentials, signals, and the regulation of chemical transmitters. This derivation showed, for the first time, that brain mechanisms could be derived by analyzing how behavior adapts autonomously in real time to a changing world. This discovery led Grossberg to study both psychology and neuroscience intensely from that time on, and to develop a theoretical method whereby to discover models capable of linking brain to mind.

Artificial Intelligence was just being introduced at Dartmouth when Grossberg began this pioneering work. It is an interesting historical coincidence that the first major conference on AI occurred in 1956 during the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, a year before Grossberg came to Dartmouth as a freshman.