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"Man is evidently the most intelligent animal but also, it seems, the most emotional." — D.O Hebb
D.O Hebb propose that the human capacity for recognizing patterns without eye movement is possible only as the result of an intensive and prolonged visual training that goes on from the movement of birth, during every moment that the eye are open, with an increase in skill evident over a period of 12 to 16 years at least.
During the continuous, intensive, and prolonged visual training of infancy and childhood, we learn to recognize the direction of line and the distance between points, separately for each grossly separate part of the visual field.
Let us assume then that the persistence or repetition of a trace tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.
The assumption can be precisely stated as follows: When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.
The general idea is an old one, that any two cells, or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become "associated" so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other.
One cannot guess how great the changes of growth would be; but it is conceivable, even probable, that if one knew where to look for the evidence on would find marked differences of identity in the perceptions of child and adult.
To get psychological theory out of a difficult impasse, one must find a way of reconciling tree things without recourse to animism: perceptual generalization, the stability of memory, and the instabilities of attention.
Our problem essentially is to see how a particular sensory event can have the same central effects on different occasions despite spontaneous central activity.
Considering the association areas as made up of a population of transmission units, two factors must affect the length of time needed to bring all these units under control.
One is the number of controlling fibers leading from sensory areas into association areas. The second is the number of transmission units in the association areas themselves.
We can then regard the stage of primary learning as the period of establishing a first environmental control over the association areas, and so, indirectly over behavior.
The learning occurs when the events to be associated ca already command organized trains of cortical activity; in other words, when the environment has a control of association areas that can be repeated, so that the central activity is not at random and the stimulation can impinge on the same central pattern when the training situation is repeated.
The characteristic adult learning is learning that takes place in a few trials, or in one only.
So adult learning is typically an interaction of two or perhaps three organized activities; being organized, they are capable of a continued existence after cessation of the stimulation that set them off, which gives time for the structural changes of permanent learning to take place.
This organized activity of the association areas is subject to environmental control. To the extent that the control is effective, and re-establishes the same central pattern of activity on successive trials, cumulative learning is possible.
Adult learning is thus a changed relationship between the central effects of separate stimulations, and does not directly concern the precipitating stimulus or, primary, the motor response whose control is embedded in the central activity.
The facts already discussed have indicated that one-trial learning occurs only as the association of concepts with "meaning" having, that is, a large number of associations with other concepts.
But more: the perception of an actual object that can be seen from more than one aspect, and touched, heart, smelled and tasted involves more that one phase cycle.
It must be a hierarchy: of phases, phase cycles, and a cycle of series of cycles.
"Cycle" is of course temporal: referring not to a closed anatomical pathway but to the tendency of a series of activities to recur, irregularly.
The two ideas or concepts to be associated might have not only phases, but one or more subsystems in common.
Two concepts may acquire a latent "association" without even having occurred together in the subject's past experience.
Mind is the central psychological problem, although it is no longer fashionable to say so, psychologists prefer to talk about "cognitive processes" instead.
They also, most of them, abstain from discussion of what those processes consist of and how their effects are achieved.
It is inaccurate-worse, it is misleading, to call psychology the study of behavior:
It is the study of the underlying processes, just as chemistry is the study of the atom rather than pH values and test tubes; but behavior is the primary source of data in modern psychology.
All science, from physics to physiology, is a function of its philosophic presuppositions, but psychology is more vulnerable than others to the effect of misconception in fundamental matter's because the object of its study is after all the human mind and the nature of human thought.
There is a well-developed specially called social psychology, which certainly sounds like social science; but social behavior can be considered from a biological point of view.
The idea that mind is a spirit is a theory of demonic possession, a form of the vitalism that biology got rid of a century ago.
Monism, the idea that mind and matter are not fundamentally different but different forms of the same thing: in practice in psychology, the idea that mental processes are brain processes.
Mind is the capacity for thought, consciousness, a variable state, is a present activity of thought processes in some form; and though itself is an activity of the brain.
Doies it think, and if so does that make it conscious?
The mammalian brain is enormously more complex than any present AI. not only in the number of functional elements but also in its connections, the individual neuron frequently having synaptic connection with upwards of a thousand others.
The argument then is that a computer built on the plan of the mammalian brain, and of a complexity at least equal to that of the brain of the laboratory rat, might be conscious.
Another impediment to understanding in this field common failure to see how the behavioristic emphasis in psychology came about, together with failure to understand the meaning of that term, behaviorism, known in some circles as "cognitive computing" has become a term of abuse.
In 1913, Watson did two things, that must be distinguished if we are to understand his position.
He proposed a general method for psychology, and he began the development of a theory to agree with it.
The theory was soon found to be defective, but it was not stupid and it had the immediate value of stimulating the research that led to its refutation and at the same time added to our understanding of human beings.
A factual theoretical development which have changed the study of mind and behavior as radically as genetics changed the study of heredity; have all been the product of objective analysis, that is to say: behavioristic analysis.
Thorndike, and later Skinner, on learning and reinforcement, Binet, and later Piaget on the development of though in childhood, kOhler on insight, Lashley o perception, Tolman on spatial orientation (the cognitive map), Beach on instinct as an aspect of intelligence (or vice versa), Lewin on cognitive motivation, Broadbent on the channeling of perception, and all from D.O Hebb's laboratory, showing the dependence of mind and thought on a close relation with the environment.
Unfortunately for Watson, the facts were wrong, at best incomplete, but it was not only in 1938, 25 years later, that this was finally established by Lorente de N0, and only in 1940 that the changed situation was brought to the attention of the psychological world by Hilgard and Marquis (1940), in a brief reference to the possibility of the brain's holding input before transmitting it to the muscles.
Meanwhile, psychologists had been attacking Watson's theory by experimental means, beginning with Hunter's (1913) demonstration of delayed response in Harvey Carr's laboratory at Chicago, which showed that raccoons and children possessed a kind of cognitive function that Watson's theory denied them.
"Behaviorism" is not synonymous with any particular theory of behavior; Lashley and Toldman both called themselves behaviorists, though each of them spend the better part of his career showing the inadequacy of the particular theory of behavior that Watson had proposed.
Programmed learning is not a substitute for teaching, but a valuable tool for the teacher's use where learning is concerned.
To talk of behaviorism as bind incompetence is ignorance or prejudice or both. It is certainly not a mark of fellowship.
There are things going on in ones mind that are not introspectable at all.
The role of introspection in psychological research was challenged in George Humphrey's book Thinking (1951) showed that classical instrospectors though were describing a sensation were really describing the external event or object that had given rise to the sensation.
He generalize his convincing and has not been refuted:
"We perceive objects directly, not through the intermediary of 'presentations', 'ideas', or 'sensations'.
Similarly, we imagine objects directly, not through the intermediary of images, though images are present as an important part of the whole activity" (p. 129)
What one is aware of in perception is not a percept but the object that is perceived; what is given in imagination is an illusory external object, not an internal mental representation called an image.
The great 20th century change was made by Adrian on spontaneous firing, in 1934, and Lorente de N0 on holding, in 1938.
In 1920 the cerebral cortex was solely a variable transmitter: in the common analogy, a mere switchboard.
Watson had full scientific warrant for denying any purely internal activity such as ideas or imagery, set or delayed response (in which excitation is held for short periods) or perception in the form of an elaboration of sensory input.
Today it is apparent that the nervous system is fully capable of handling ideation and creative thought. But there is hard core of learning theorist who, denying any interest in neural function, still conspicuosly limit their research and discussion to those features that Watson's neurophysiology could comprehend.
Other psychologist, many of the, are set in a different theoretical posture, but still one that was determined by the long battle against Watsonian theory.
They too deny any interest in neurology and still be deeply influenced by an earlier set of neurological ideas.
The theory that mental events and brain events run side by side, perfectly, correlated but not causally related: in the old analogy, like two clocks that stay perfectly in step but not because either influences the other.
It has been highly regarded as a way of avoiding commitment to an interaction of mind and body, or even worse, identifying them, while recognizing how closely influences the other.
It has been highly regarded as a way of avoiding commitment to an interaction of mind and body, or even worse, identifying them, while recognizing how closely they are related.
Parallelism says that the actors in the theater, representing anger and fear did so with no guidance from their conscious minds; whatever thought there may have been in those entirely separated minds, the bodies functioned on the stage as self-programmed robots.
In the two-clock comparison with parallelism, the two clocks are separate entities by virtue of their reparation in space; if in addition to being identical in function.
They also occupied the same space, as mental activity and brain activity appear to do visual, auditory, verbal fluency, verbal comprehension, and so on each relating to particular parts of the brain, they would be on clock.
The objective evidence tells me that something complex goes on inside my head, I conclude therefore that something else is active also.
Useful tool but handle with care.
- D.O Hebb
Properly done, reductionism does not substitute neurophysiology for psychology; when it assumes that pain or ecstasy consists of neural firing it recognizes the reality of pain and joy at the same time; it does not try to explain them away.
It is the method of theoretical analysis followed resynthesis, whose validity depends strictly on wheter the result accords with the psychological as well as the neurological evidence.
What has given reductionism a bad name is the conclusion, after a the
oretical analysis of a mental variable has been made and it is "reduced" to some pattern of neural activity, that mental process in effect no longer exists.
Obviously this is all nonsense; when a complex is reduced, theoretically, to its component parts, the whole still exists.
Anxiety must be a pattern of firing of neurons in the limbic system, but the pattern is as real as the individual neurons.
En engineer designing a bridge must think at several levels of complexity.
His conceptions of the bridge as a whole is very molar, in terms let us say of a center span, two side spans, two piers, and two abutments or (if you are from CR a single bailey thing and call it done).
When the engineer tuns to the design of the center span he begins to think in terms of lower-order units such as steel beams, rivets or welding, and masses of reinforced concrete. However, these items are still very molar.
Are engineer if asked would say that a steel I-beam is just a special arrangement of atoms or of electrons, neutrons, and so forth.
At this level of analysis there is indeed nothing but atoms or atomic particles.
But there are other levels of analysis; from the point of view of a practical man, all this stuff about atoms may be fine in theory but then it comes to bridge-building it is no more than theory.
At this level of analysis the I-beam is an elementary unit, obviously real and no fiction.
Reality now is steel and concrete.
So from one point of view, reality is the atom, and the steel beam being a convenient way of dealing with large numbers of atoms in a particular pattern; while from another, the steel that is heavy and cold and resistant to distortion is reality, and atoms are theoretical items only.
For different modes of thought, different realities: "reality" referring evidently to the mode of being that one takes for granted as the starting point of thought.
Even if we could identify the part played by every of the 10 or more billion neurons in the brain, the human mind of the scientist is obviously incapable of thinking of the whole activity in such terms.
It is not possible to follow the varying patterns of the firing of these cells as individual units.
Reductionism is not a means of abolishing psychological entities and processes but a way of learning more about them.