From Sea Slugs to Thinking Machines: New Book Traces the Biology Behind AI

“Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology” by Bob Burgin is released with Forbes Books.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, September 8, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- "Emergence: How Our Twenty-Watt Brains Unlocked Intelligence Beyond Biology" by Bob Burgin is now available on Amazon and at major booksellers. The book is published with Forbes Books, the exclusive business book publishing imprint of Forbes.

Most explanations of artificial intelligence begin with the machine: the models, the data, the compute. Bob Burgin begins somewhere else. The human brain runs on roughly twenty watts, about the draw of a dim light bulb, and from that small allowance it learns, predicts, adapts, and creates. Then humans borrowed the principles that emerged from constraint and built them into machines plugged into the power grid. "Emergence" is about what happens to intelligence when you remove that constraint.

Drawing on neuroscience, memory research, consciousness studies, and machine learning, the book’s journey spans Nobel Prize-winning research on sea slug neurons, AlphaGo’s unexpected strategies, the case of a man who spent decades unable to form new memories, and extended dialogues Burgin conducted with today’s AI systems about whether machines could have something like consciousness. Throughout, he examines the roles of memory, emotion, embodiment, and constraint in how intelligence arises.

“The protein folding problem sat unsolved for fifty years, and it wasn’t cracked by a biologist alone,” Burgin said. “It was cracked in partnership with a neural network built on principles we borrowed from our own brains. Three million researchers in more than a hundred and ninety countries now use the result, and drug discovery and precision cancer treatment are next on that list.”

“I use the term ‘emergence’ in the sense that complexity gives rise to surprising behavior that, while not obvious from the parts alone, can still be explained in terms of them,” he added. “It is how complexity becomes cognition, how neurons become thought, how code becomes conversation.”

"Emergence" presents AI as an extension of a much older story about how learning systems develop. Burgin invites readers to reconsider what intelligence is, where it comes from, and what its movement beyond biological limits could mean for the future.

This release is posted on behalf of Forbes Books (operated by Advantage Media Group under license).

About the Author

Bob Burgin is an entrepreneur who has spent thirty-five years translating scientific research into products. For the past fifteen years, he has led a company built on applying brain science to how people learn, working with neuroscientists including Dr. Robert Bjork, Dr. Daniel Schacter, and Dr. Henry Roediger III.

His work explores how the brain encodes, stores, and retrieves knowledge—insights he argues are foundational to understanding artificial intelligence. Before founding his learning company, he built and sold a web-based customer service platform, working alongside Stanford researchers on human-computer interaction. He has published articles on artificial intelligence and the economy with Forbes.

He lives in Boulder, Colorado. Learn more at BobBurgin.org.

About Forbes Books

Founded in 2016 in partnership with Advantage Media Group, Forbes Books is the exclusive book publishing imprint of Forbes Media. Forbes Books offers business and thought leaders a way to share their ideas and expertise with the world. Authors are carefully vetted to ensure their stories and insights align with the Forbes mission of driving success through innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. For more information, visit books.forbes.com.

Allison Vittardi
Forbes Books
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