Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of the Mind

Computational neuroscientist Sussillo unpacks his difficult childhood and considers “how complex patterns arrive from simple parts” in his inspirational debut. Sussillo grew up in 1970s Albuquerque with a younger sister and two heroin-addicted parents. His father’s abandonment of the family and his mother’s institutionalization resulted in Sussillo and his sister, Esther, bouncing between 13 different foster homes in their childhood. Time spent playing arcade games like Ms. Pac-Man led a young Sussillo to grow curious about how computers worked; he eventually double-majored in computer science and mathematics at Carnegie Mellon. Though severe panic attacks interrupted his college years, he graduated in his mid-20s and pursued a PhD at Columbia, then worked in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom before landing at the Google Brain AI research group. Sussillo manages to make his work mathematically modeling the human mind accessible to a layperson, but what stand out most are his reflections on overcoming hardship and his guilt about Esther’s difficulty doing the same. His musings offer both a stirring tribute to resilience and a humble acknowledgment of how much remains unknown about the human mind. It’s a gripping and erudite self-portrait. Agent: Jenna Free, Folio Literary. (Mar.)