By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence.

In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music, but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms.

One point in the book presents an analogy about how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.

[1][2] Gödel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction[3] and the National Book Award for Science Hardcover.

He attempts to show readers how to perceive reality outside their own experience and embrace such paradoxical questions by rejecting the premise, a strategy also called "unasking".

Elements of computer science such as call stacks are also discussed in Gödel, Escher, Bach, as one dialogue describes the adventures of Achilles and the Tortoise as they make use of "pushing potion" and "popping tonic" involving entering and leaving different layers of reality.

Gödel, Escher, Bach won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award for Science Hardcover.

Martin Gardner's July 1979 column in Scientific American stated, "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event.

[10] In 2019, British mathematician Marcus du Sautoy curated a series of events at London's Barbican Centre to celebrate the book's fortieth anniversary.

He knew, however, that "there were a million issues to consider" when translating,[14] since the book relies not only on word-play, but on "structural puns" as well—writing where the form and content of the work mirror each other (such as the "Crab canon" dialogue, which reads almost exactly the same forwards as backwards).