Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory
To computational neuroscientist Stephen Grossberg, “all conscious states are resonant states.” The conscious brain is the resonant brain where attentive consciousness regulates actions that interact with learning, recognition, and prediction. Grossberg's idea is that the mind is an activity, not a thing; a verb, not a noun—it's what you do, not what you have or use.
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Stephen Grossberg
Cognitive Scientist
Stephen Grossberg 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 emeritus of Mathematics & Statistics, Psychological & Brain Sciences, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University.
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
Consciousness emerges when the brain enters a resonant state that integrates attention, learning, and prediction.
How It Works
Bottom-up inputs match top-down expectations, creating a feedback loop that produces stable, resonant awareness.
Distinguishing Idea
Only resonant states involving feature-based representations (like color or shape) can become conscious.
Implications
Consciousness enables fast, stable learning in a changing world by marking meaningful, complete representations.
Raises the Question
Can artificial systems achieve resonance deep enough to support real conscious awareness?
Grossberg’s Adaptive Resonance Theory
To computational neuroscientist Stephen Grossberg, “all conscious states are resonant states.” The conscious brain is the resonant brain where attentive consciousness regulates actions that interact with learning, recognition, and prediction (Grossberg, 2019). Grossberg's idea is that the mind is an activity, not a thing; a verb, not a noun—it's what you do, not what you have or use. His theoretical foundation is “Adaptive Resonance Theory” (ART), a cognitive and neural concept of how the brain autonomously learns to consciously attend, learn, categorize, recognize, and predict objects and events in a changing world (Grossberg, 2013). Central to ART's predictive power is its ability to carry out fast, incremental, and stable unsupervised and supervised learning in response to external events.
Mechanisms of Resonance
ART specifies mechanistic links in advanced brains that connect processes regulating conscious attention, seeing, and knowing with those regulating looking and reaching. Consciousness thus enables learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony during both unsupervised and supervised learning. These mechanistic links arise from basic properties of brain design principles such as complementary computing, hierarchical resolution of uncertainty, and adaptive resonance. These principles, recursively, require conscious states to mark perceptual and cognitive representations that are complete, context sensitive, and stable enough to control effective actions (Grossberg, 2019).
Foundational to Grossberg's way of thinking is the idea that all biological processes, notably our brains, self-organize, and that all cellular systems illustrate variations of a universal developmental code. All these processes are regulated using physically different instantiations of mechanistically similar laws of short-term memory or activation, and long-term memory or learned memory, that are conserved across species, including in our brains (Grossberg, 2021).
Resonance and Consciousness
Resonance in the brain comes about via bottom-up patterns interacting with learned top-down expectations, leading to a persistent resonant state that can also lead to conscious awareness when it includes feature-selective cells that represent qualia. In this way, Grossberg uses ART to explain many mind and brain data about how humans consciously see, hear, feel, and know things (Grossberg, 2023).
At the risk of oversimplification, Grossberg's unified theory of mind has three “laws” of consciousness: (i) All conscious states are resonant states; (ii) only resonant states with feature-based representations can become conscious; (iii) multiple resonant states can resonate together. He believes that the varieties of brain resonances and the conscious experiences that they support make progress towards solving the hard problem of consciousness (Grossberg, 2017).
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