Brain = Computer? No, according to new study
The theory that the mind works like a computer, in a series of distinct stages, was an important steppingstone in cognitive science, but it has outlived its usefulness, concludes a new Cornell University study. Instead, the mind should be thought of more as working the way biological organisms do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey.
In a new study published online this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27-July 1), Michael Spivey, a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer. The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension is a continuous process.
“For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer,” said Spivey. “More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties — like a biological organism.”
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“Brain = Computer? No, according to new study”
This is a clever design and will no doubt be extended to produce more specific evidence. But I wonder where he got the stuff about packets and binary symbols. My impression is that his evidence is quite consistent with the conceptual model proposed by Selfridge (1959. Pandemonium: A paradigm for learning. In Symposium on the mechanization of thought processes. )
http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/pandemonium.html
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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 30 Jun 2005
