Cognition

A psychologist and educator, and a pioneer in the field of cognition, Bruner provides an outline for a new synthesis of inquiry into mind and culture. The book consists of the 1989-90 Jerusalem-Harvard lectures divided into four chapters. The first, "The Proper Study of Man," is a critique of the current antihistorical,anticultural bias of cognitive psychology, especially its information-processing model of the mind. "Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture" asserts that culturally shaped notions, stories, and narratives organize experience and manage expectations. "Entry into Meaning" views the beginnings of social understanding as a capacity to render experience in terms of narrative discourse (to be in a culture is to be in a set of connecting stories). Finally, "Autobiography and Self" illustrates the classic concept of Self from the perspective of cultural psychology--that "selves are not isolated nuclei of consciousness locked in the head, but are 'distributed' interperson...

Maturana's lab

Whenever ice cream sales rise, so do shark attacks. As more economists are recruited to the Treasury, inflation rises. In his fifth lesson of a weekly series, author Michael Blastland gives hints about reading too much into "correlated" facts.

Many people think that genetic engineering will change everything, even our very bodies and minds. It will, eventually. Right now, however, attempts to apply new genetic knowledge are having profound effects, not on our bodies, but on how we understand our bodies. They are revealing that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.

I am a philosopher who works in the areas of cognitive science, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind. On this site you will find information about my work.

Antonio Damasio is an internationally recognized leader in neuroscience. His research has helped to elucidate the neural basis for the emotions and has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making.

According to Clark, the dynamic loops through which mind and world interact are not merely instrumental. The cycle of activity that runs from brain through body and world and back again actually constitutes cognition. The mind, on this account, is not bounded by the biological organism but extends into the environment of that organism.

Philosophers such as Berkeley, and Hume, and early experimental psychologists, such as Wundt and James, understood ideas in general to be mental images, and today it is very widely believed that much imagery functions as mental representations (or mental models), playing an important role in memory and thinking. Indeed, some have gone so far as to suggest that images are best understood as by definition a form of inner, mental or neural representation; in the case of hypnagogic and hypnapompic imagery, however, it is not representational at all. Others, however, reject the view that the image experience may be identical with (or directly caused by) any such representation in the mind or the brain; their case, however, still needs to take account of the non-representational forms of imagery.

Walter J. Freeman (born January 30, 1927) is an American biologist, theoretical neuroscientist and philosopher who has conducted pioneering research in how brains generate meaning. His main body of research has been on the perception of rabbits using electroencephalography. Based on a theoretical framework of neurodynamics that includes chaos theory, he believed that the currency of brains is primarily meaning and only secondarily information.

The influential critique of the ontological assumptions of computationalist and representationalist cognitive science, as well as artificial intelligence, made by philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has marked new directions for integration of neurosciences with an embodied ontology. The work of Dreyfus has influenced cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to study phenomenology and embodied cognitive science and/or enactivism. One of such cases is neuroscientist Walter Freeman, whose neurodynamical analysis has a marked Merleau-Pontyian approach. However, recent trends on the matter appear to reject Dreyfus' interpretation of Husserl while at the same time maintaining a high interest in the integration of Husserlian phenomenology into the sciences of mind, as demonstrated by Evan Thompson's recent work.