Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” and one of the leading voices in artificial intelligence, has made a bold statement: humans aren’t primarily rational beings — we’re analogy-driven thinkers. And as neuroscience and AI evolve, this insight could completely reshape our understanding of human behavior and the humanities.
Speaking as Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Hinton explained that new discoveries about how the brain works are challenging long-held assumptions about logic and rationality in human thought. “As we develop more understanding of how the brain works, we’re going to radically change our view of how people work,” Hinton said.
A Shift Bigger Than Freud’s Psychoanalysis
Hinton compared this paradigm shift to the early 20th century, when Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis revolutionized how people viewed the mind. That era normalized the idea that humans often act on unconscious motivations.
“We accepted that we’re influenced by emotions and hidden drives. This new shift is bigger,” Hinton claimed. “People have believed for a long time that we’re logical beings. But in truth, we’re more like analogy machines.”
How We Actually Think
According to Hinton, human reasoning relies on analogy, not logic. Our brains constantly draw comparisons to familiar things to understand new ones. “We think using analogies — not just one, but many — at once,” he said. “That’s what shapes our decisions, beliefs, and creativity.”
While logic has its place — in systems like mathematics and finance — Hinton emphasized it’s just a thin layer on top of a more complex, analogy-based way of thinking.
Why This Matters for AI and Humanities
This insight isn’t just philosophical — it could directly shape the future of artificial intelligence. Hinton suggests that to make machines truly intelligent, we need to build AI that thinks like us — not with strict logic, but with flexible analogy-making.
It also has deep implications for fields like psychology, literature, and philosophy, which have traditionally viewed human behavior through a more rational lens.
As we stand on the cusp of a new age in AI and cognitive science, Geoffrey Hinton’s message is clear: to understand ourselves and build machines in our image, we must rethink how we think. And it turns out, we’re not as rational as we thought — we’re beautifully complex, analogy-driven minds.
