Gary Marcus became fascinated by the mind in high school after reading The Mind’s I, a collection of essays on consciousness edited by the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter and the philosopher Daniel Dennett, as well as Hofstadter’s metaphorical book on minds and machines, Gödel, Escher, Bach. Around the same time, he wrote a computer program designed to translate Latin into English. The difficulty of the task made him realize that re-creating intelligence in machines would surely require a much greater understanding of the phenomena at work inside the human mind.