Last night, Cubberly Auditorium was packed long before Prof. Douglas Hofstadter of Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences took the stage to lecture on his fundamental theory on human cognition in a talk entitled, “Analogy as the Core of Cognition.” Every seat was occupied at the 8 p.m. start time and stragglers found themselves huddled in the wings of the auditorium straining to see the stage. Many attendees sat in the lobby area and listened to the lecture over a set of speakers; some even lined the back of the stage.

The lecture was second in this year’s lineup of Presidential and Endowed Lectures in the Humanities and Arts. The program receives funding from the President’s Office and the speakers are chosen by an advisory committee of Stanford faculty members. According to Matthew Tiews, the associate director of the Stanford Humanities Center, speakers aren’t necessarily affiliated with Stanford, but are usually high-profile individuals who have pioneered new areas of thought in their respective disciplines. Hofstadter, however, is a Stanford alumnus who returned to complete his John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in the computer science department.

Donald Kennedy, a former president of the University and the current editor-in-chief of Science Magazine, enumerated some of Hofstadter’s honors and achievements in his introduction. In 1979, Hofstadter published “Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid,” (GEB) for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. The book, which Hofstadter later described as “a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter,” was a New York Times best-seller in the early eighties, and, according to a preview of the lecture on Stanford’s Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts Web site, the book explores most of the topics Hofstadter would investigate in greater depth in later research and writings.

Currently a professor of Cognitive Science and the Director of the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University, Hofstadter sampled many disciplines in his graduate and undergraduate career. He pursued a degree in mathematics, but when his graduate work in this field at University of California-Berkeley proved to be “far too abstract,” Hofstadter turned to Physics at the University of Oregon. He received a Ph.D. in physics, but his preoccupation with the mechanisms through which human cognition is shaped led him to write GEB, and to accept a professorship at the University of Indiana.

Monday’s lecture featured the concept of the analogy as the glue between complex systems of language and human understanding of those lingual representations. Hofstadter explained that analogy is just “a perception of the common essence between two things.” He illustrated how an individual creates an analogy or identifies a commonality between two “categories,” or “circumstances that evoke a particular primordial concept,” through a humorous example about his childhood and observations of his infant daughter Monica.

“When I was a child, I filled notebooks with tables of integers raised to various powers. I was fascinated with the exponent,” Hofstadter said. He recalled inquiring about the subscripts written in one of his father’s notebooks. He said he remembered feeling completely “flattened by” his father’s answer that the subscripts really didn’t perform any mathematical function.

Hofstadter linked this particular sensation to a circumstance he witnessed years later.

“My daughter was playing with the buttons on a hand-held vacuum cleaner, and she discovered that one of them didn’t work,” he said. “When I explained to her that one of the buttons really didn’t do anything, I recalled my childhood moment of disappointment.”

Hofstadter presented a transparency that showed each corresponding part of the timelines evoked an association. He concluded that analogies “have no purpose — they just happen. Their only purpose is to serve evolution.”

The remaining portion of Hofstadter’s lecture focused on the accumulation of analogies into increasingly complex concepts. He presented various lists of words, in modern American vernacular, which might only be defined by some sort of complex flow chart of more essential, “primordial” concepts.

“How could you explain the concept of Wikipedia to someone who lived a few centuries ago?” Hofstadter joked. “And yet, these are concepts that we use and understand very fluidly.”

Finally, Hofstadter introduced the idea of “word blends.”

“We use analogy to judge whether something is a member of a category, or in other words, whether to use that word or phrase,” he said. Word blends are common speech errors that he claims reveal the competition between two or more applicable words or concepts.

One overhead example represented a hypothetical dialogue between two people. It read: “‘Is Danny there? “I don’t know — I’ll go seck.’” What sounds like gibberish, Hofstadter explained, is really a hybrid of the words “see” and “check,” which were “competing” in the person’s subconscious. “Every word has a subterranean fight under the surface. It may be the lengthening of a consonant, or the distortion of a vowel that shows the competition of one word over another,” Hofstadter said.

These word blends and other applications, he concluded, exemplify how “analogy is the core of cognition.”

Audience members characterized Hofstadter’s presentation as sweeping. Freshman Aaron Quiggle, an aspiring philosophy major. said he “found the lecture entertaining and funny.”

“I though he might go into more detail however,” he said. “There seems like there could be another reason for why words and language are competing. He didn’t give a solid defense of his theory or say why we should prioritize his explanation over others.”

Another listener, Gordon Cichon of Santa Clara, said, “I read the [GEB], and it is definitely more sophisticated than what I got from the lecture. It takes you months to read and understand. I really like Hofstadter’s book because I think it is a magnificent piece of art; however, I personally think that the human mind is not that easily understood. We have been trying to simulate analogy and human thought in computers for years and apparently the mind doesn’t work that way.”

The lecture will be followed by a question and answer session today at 4 p.m. at the Stanford Humanities Center.