A Cognitive Un-revolution

In science, more often than not common sense gets in the way of the acceptance of ideas that don’t make sense, but are nonetheless true. The Copernican, Darwinian, and Einsteinian revolutions are a case in point, as rotating earths, natural selection, and a mutable time and space certainly go against the grain of what our senses and sensibilities tell us is true. In terms of psychology, and how we think about how we think, common sense is of two minds, both literally and figuratively. It’s a common place truism that we behave because we follow some rational order or calculus of logically considered values, but it’s equally true that we recognize that emotions or drives have a hand in how we act. This eternal battle between reason and emotion is great stuff for drama, pop psychologists, and Freudian psychology, but for many psychologists, it’s a bit too messy. For cognitive scientists, evolutionary psychologists, and behaviorists, incorporating the metaphors of emotion is a risky thing, since talking about feelings can degenerate into undisciplined metaphor, and have psychologists ending up talking and behaving like ‘Dear Abby’, or worse, like Dr.Phil! So they quarantine all that touchy feeling lingo, and come up with their own language that is logical, rational, and maps to a brain that obligingly works in a computational way that such logic requires. And of course they trumpet this fact as a revolution, since like the scientific revolutions of yore, it breaks the bonds of common sense.

The problem is, breaking the bonds of common sense is one thing, but a scientific revolution requires a bit more than a neat logic that seems to imply a new worldly state of affairs. You have to have the ability to test that knowledge and to apply it. Missing either of these and all you have is a nice tale to tell that to paraphrase Shakespeare is full of sound and furious rhetoric, yet signifies nothing. And the rub is, these sub-disciplines in psychology have no practical meaning to the great un-lectured masses, who promptly ignore their revolutionary wisdom. So, in spite of the ‘cognitive revolution’ or the assorted revolutions heralded by behaviorists, evolutionary psychologists, and even neuroscientists, people will still refer to wisdom that embodies comfortable and familiar emotional metaphors and seems applicable to their daily concerns, namely the wisdom of the Dr. Phils of the world.

When common sense is replaced with new metaphors that describe new and unfamiliar realities, our inconvenience is assuaged by new procedures that help us understand and predict new things. If not, we ignore it, and allow it to gather mold in the confines of an academic journal, as is the case with cognitive, evolutionary and behavioristic psychology. Which brings us affectionately to a new branch of psychology called appropriately ‘affective neuroscience’. Affective neuroscience simply puts back emotion or affect into the equations for behavior, saying no less that we can speak of feelings in the same breath as the neural processes that allow them to be. So for psychology, emotion is back in the game, and perhaps unlike the other affect-less branches of psychology, it may make meaningful predictions, and create procedures that have more practical value than the Barnum and Bailey nostrums of pop psychologists. One thing for sure, it will all seem in the end like common sense. We shall see.

Idiot Savant

Idiot Savant: An individual who exclusively focuses on the mastery one aspect of performance (doing math, playing piano), to the exclusion of all other skills, both technical and interpersonal. Known in less severe cases as nerd savants. Idiot savants are to be distinguished from those folks who focus on all aspects of performance and are masters of none, but think they are savants in one way or the other. They are known as ‘that bunch of idiots’, or more formally as religious fundamentalists or Republicans. (From Mezmer’s Dictionary of Bad Psychology)


As an individual who has a decidedly more than passing interest in psychology, my penchant for thinking about it all the time does call into question my ability to act and think about other important things, such as taking out the garbage. So regardless of whether my musings on the topic merit a Nobel or booby prize, my wife will think that as a man about the house, I am a total idiot. Which brings me to man’s special genius, and perhaps handicap, namely his ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of almost everything else, and to do so forever. Isaac Newton was so accursed, and attributed his development of the calculus and the laws of gravity to simply thinking about it, constantly. Of course he also thought constantly about the alchemical disciplines that aimed to discover how to transmute lead into gold, and it here that posterity has judged him not as savant, but as a total idiot.

When we constantly think about any topic, we will master that topic, and amaze our friends with our intellectual acumen, if of course they care to listen. Mozart, Newton, and Einstein did this to popular and intellectual acclaim, but unfortunately male obsessions are a bit more mundane. So what do us guys have for the future edification of the world? Usually it has something to do with recounting baseball statistics, reaching the tenth level in Dungeons and Dragons, or recalling all the episodes of Star Trek. Of course, we keep this special genius secret, partially because of modesty, but mainly because no one really cares. Which brings us of course to real idiot savants, which is an unfortunate and pejorative name to give to those individuals who through a quirk of nature are neurologically attuned to focus on inconsequential acts that in their perfect execution become quite extraordinary. Whether it be the ability to perform unerring mental calculation, play the piano by ear and with note-worthy perfection, or just remember what one had for breakfast for all the days they lived, idiot savants are too relentless in their quest for a single minded perfection. If fact, by being single minded, they have no mind for anything else, hence the unfortunate term idiot.

The curse of genius and madness is that both are single-minded things, Whether it is displayed in obsessive compulsiveness, addiction, or autism, to call it good or bad, creative or merely stupid depends ultimately upon the acclaim of others. It does make sanity a relative thing, and renders our judgement on the poor souls who think a bit too straight to remember their manners or when to take out the garbage to be, well, the mere opinion of an idiot.

B. F. Skinner and the Magic Toaster Oven

One thing everybody needs to know is how to make toast. Baking bread is a matter for the specialist, but toast is for the great unbuttered masses. As baking technology progressed over the years, there was a little fry cook who perfected a tiny oven that could toast bread on both sides. Escaping the bakery, the fry cook took his technology to the masses, and soon everyone had little toasters, and centers for toaster technology spread throughout the land. But sadly, most of the toasters didn’t work, made poor toast, and ended up with many people feeling rather burned. But the fry cook did not admit defeat, the masses did not forget, and because of a bad baker, baking got a bad name, and any toaster ovens that came out of bakeries were immediately suspect.

Luckily for human invention, at least of the practical and mechanical sort, the end of this scenario rarely happens. Escaping the laboratory with your grand invention in hand can be a recipe for grand success or an equally grand failure. In technology, usually the faux pas of an enterprising genius is replaced with a better model by a more enterprising and market savvy type who understands how to deliver what the masses really need. From computers to cars, the list is endless. The public forgives and forgets past mistakes, and whether the product is a toaster or TV, progress marches on.

For entrepreneurs and inventors, failure is evident, final, and is sealed by apathy of others, namely the consumer. For philosophers and psychologists however, bad ideas have an often different fate, as they commonly admit no failure, blame the consumer, and continue to advocate the ineffective packaging of ideas even though they are as useful as bad toaster ovens.

Take the concept of behaviorism.

For the first fifty years of the twentieth century, behaviorism was an innocuous thing. Behaviorists were folks who studied the behavior of animals and tried to discern the lawfulness of behavior in a laboratory setting. Because animals couldn’t really talk to you to tell you that they would have preferred not to live in cages and run through mazes, they indirectly told the psychologist through their behavior, hence the name behaviorist. Behaviorism existed quite nicely until the behaviorist B. F. Skinner had the brainstorm to escape from the laboratory, and apply the same principles of reward or reinforcement to the common man. Well, it didn’t work, and left a bad philosophical taste in minds of everyone. So behaviorism was shunned, ignored, and except for the tiny squeak of a Skinnerian movement that refuses to die, was relegated by popular and academic opinion to the junkyard of failed intellectual ideas. In other words, behaviorism was toast.

In our fanciful example, one bad baker did in the toaster industry, a disaster for sure if it happened in real life. But equally disastrous and real has been the public identification of behaviorism with B. F. Skinner, when behaviorism has marched on past Skinner to identify through animal subjects the real processes that underlie learning. Called affective neuroscience or bio-behaviorism, it still does not garner respect or a lot of attention, as behaviorism is still identified with a baker of ideas who to the end of his days never learned to toast bread. But the future after all may bode better for this new breed of behaviorist. After all, people still need as much to make their behavior right as they need to rightly make toast.

Ivory Towers and Ivory Basements

Long ago, in the kingdom of Mystonia, there was an ivory tower. It rose above an ivory castle which was planted in turn above a suitably ivory basement. In the tower lived the supreme intellects of the land, who shielded from the unwelcome bustle of everyday life, thought of perfect forms algebraic and crystalline. Meanwhile, down in the basement below, the accounting firm of Watson and Skinner inventoried all the facts of Mystonia in a perpetual and beautiful audit. This was reality, true science even, and it was all a reflection of ethereal ideas and inventoried facts.

If only, the Ivorians philosophers and accountants thought, the children would understand. Romping in the fields or shepherding livestock, the children dreamed, like dreamers always do of fantastical images which expanded and contracted reality in wholly new ways. Roaming the hills, young Albert thought of descending in an elevator at infinite speed, while little Isaac sat under a tree and wondered how a falling apple was like a falling moon. Meanwhile, young shepherd boys Kent and Jaak wondered that if animals could speak, what would they say?

The Ivorians called to task their dreaming youngsters, and in an intellectual scold, told them that reality was not in a child’s imagination of time and space and affective states but in abstract and disembodied facts. To them, metaphor was alien to the pursuit of scientific truth, and the sooner they abandoned anthropomorphizing the world the better. But the children protested. They had performed their homework, and had done the math. And indeed, the metaphorical mind experiments of youth could be translated into the finer metaphor of mathematics, and be used to give meaning as well as measure to the world.

But the Ivorians remained unconvinced, and with a huff shuttled back to their dim abodes. Meanwhile, the children went back to play, and when they grew up as Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Kent Berridge and Jaak Panksepp, reinvented the world.

When we think of science we think of its settled results, ideas that are refined and distilled into abstract language of mathematics, the genome, and rates of behavior. But the history of science and scientific thinking tells us otherwise. As any physicist will tell you, the mathematics on a chalkboard reflects the imprint of metaphor, as the ideas that spin in their minds reflect fantastic notions of the big and the small, of time and space. It’s only when you write it down that it seems so incomprehensible. Like music, intellectual symphonies start in the mind not as notes, but as sounds. And so it is for all the sciences, from physics to biology. Lately, this same Ivorian argument, long a non issue in the physical sciences, has riven psychology. As neuroscience reveals that the mind is moved by its pleasures and pains as much as a body is moved by gravity and inertia, the Ivorians rustle again, and reassert mental life is no more than a dull collection of behavioral or neural objects or disembodied mentalistic entities like will or desire. But they will shuffle off as before, while the children will reinvent the world.

What the Ivorians did not understand, and do not understand to this day, is that reality does not wink at you from a mosaic of facts, and neither is it apprehended solely as a mathematical abstraction. It is one thing that comes from a binding of things, the metaphors of mundane experience with the abstract metaphors of language. Metaphors are the ties that bind reality to our world and our abstract projection of our world. To see this dual edged coin is at once to romp in the field, think thoughts with color, sound, and fury, and distilled into an inescapable logic, to reinvent the world

Albert Einstein and the Sheboygan Institute of Physics

It is a little known fact that Albert Einstein first submitted his paper outlining his theory of special relativity to for the Journal of the Physics Institute of Sheboygan (somewhere in Illinois I think).

Needless to say, his reply was not something he anticipated.

The first reviewer rejected the manuscript because nowhere in it did Einstein demonstrate how relativity could shed any new light on why dinosaurs went extinct. The second reviewer objected that Einstein’s math used non-euclidean math, when everybody knew that Euclidean math was the proper tool to use. Finally the third review said relativity didn’t make sense, of the common variety that is.

Luckily for Einstein and physics, this little known fact was of course an unknown fact. Ideas in physics, like ideas is most of the physical and biological sciences are understood, tested, and communicated with a common set of metaphors. Although formalized in mathematics, the real thought is with the thought experiment. Einstein was the first to popularize the notion that manipulating the common metaphors of existence, like observing the behavior of two speeding trains, or feeling weightless in a rapidly descending elevator, can be used to develop ideas that can have a mathematical logic that in turn can be used to make predictions about the big and the small. Like Newton and his apple, Einstein and his rushing trains, or modern explanations of the universe based on infinitesimal loops and cosmic string, physicists can freely use whatever metaphors they want, knowing that in the end they can all be reduced to logical principles, and because they are rooted in a reality observed, can be in principle tested.

When we move across the academic hall to the psychology department, metaphorical thinking is just as common, except that no one can agree on which set of metaphors are the best ones to use to describe behavior. Are the metaphors of Freud best, or do we use Skinner’s or even Dr. Phil’s?

No one knows.

What this means is that psychologists spend more time talking past each other than to each other because no one group will accept the metaphorical currency of the other. Like the Sheboygan reviewers, each psychologist has a different way that he thinks the language of psychology ought to be. The reason for this impasse is simple, namely because at root psychologists simply have no set of metaphors that can describe how the human brain works, and untethered to a neural reality, ideas fly off like errant meteors.

Think about it. Before the telescope and microscope, no one had a clue about how the universe or our bodies worked, and hence metaphorical conceptions of the universe and life ran wild. It was only with Galileo and Pasteur that metaphors of time, space, and disease began to be constrained, and represent the metaphors of scientific knowledge that we know today. In other words, because we had metaphors that were grounded in the reality of observation, physicists and laypeople alike at last had a common metaphorical language of how the world is and how it works.

Only when we have the metaphorical language of how the brain works, and in particular how motivation emerges from a working brain, will be able to escape from the confusion that is modern psychology. As for myself, recently I submitted my own little article on a topic of motivation (namely muscular relaxation) to a few psychologists to vet their opinions. The first one responded that it was not written using the data language of behaviorism, therefore he could not comment. The second psychologist was perplexed, and pleaded ignorance, or was it stupidity?
I am now waiting for the third response, which no doubt will have something to do with dinosaurs.

I can’t wait.