How The Mind Works (The Universe Within - A New Science Explores The Human Mind)

HOW THE MIND WORKS - The New York Times
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January 24, 1982
HOW THE MIND WORKS

COPYRIGHT c 1982 BY MORTON HUNT This article is adapted from ''The Universe Within: A New
Science Explores the Human Mind,'' to be published next month by Simon and Schuster. By Morton
Hunt No scientific endeavor of recent years has been more dramatic or commanded greater public
attention than our exploration of outer space. In these same years, with no drama whatever and
almost no public notice, a small band of researchers, now numbering perhaps a thousand, has been
exploring inner space - the universe within our minds, where, in words and images, we make a
working model of what lies outside.
These researchers are practitioners of a new discipline called cognitive science, an amalgam of
psychology, psycholinguistics, computer science, psychobiology, anthropology and philosophy. They
are investigating how we construct that inner universe and then how, by tinkering with it, we know
what to expect of the world outside - in short, how we think. Their endeavors were characterized by
a participant at a cognitive-science seminar organized several years ago by the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation in New York City (a major backer of the new discipline) as ''the start of an intellectual
adventure somewhat comparable to the position in which physics stood toward the end of the
Renaissance.''
Cognitive science is still far from being a coherent and integrated body of knowledge. Often, indeed,
the members of this new discipline are quarrelsome and at odds with one another - a trait that
Thomas S. Kuhn, the philosopher of science and author o f ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,''
has said is typical at this early stage of development.
For what is happening is nothing less than revolutionary. From the 1920's until about a decade ago,
the human mind was out of fashion, scientifically speaking, and ignored by most American
psychologists on the ground that theories about what happens within it are both unverifiable and
unnecessary. Such was the view of behaviorism, the theory that dominated academic and research
psychology for half a century. (Freudian psychology, though inward-looking, reigned supreme only
within the psychotherapies and, in any case, dealt more with emotional processes than with
thinking.) Behaviorists held that the scientific approach to human behavior was to observe the
relationships between the external stimuli and the observable responses; if, knowing the former, one
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could predict the latter, there was no need to speculate about what took place, unseen, within the
mind. Indeed, they viewed such speculations as benighted; B.F. Skinner, the dean of contemporary
behaviorists, has said that efforts to explain human behavior in terms of what goes on in the mind
are akin to primitive animism - the belief that spirits dwell in material objects.
This disesteem of the human mind has had numerous parallels elsewhere in American life - in the
behavior therapies that treat patients by methods not unlike those of animal trainers; in the doctrine
of certain animal-behavior specialists that we are only naked apes, ruled more by primitive neural
structures than by the thinking forebrain, and in those many movements that celebrate feeling and
mystical experience while denigrating the intellect and reasoning.
Cognitive scientists, in contrast, hold that the human mind is highly complex and thoroughly
admirable, that one cannot understand human behavior without knowing what goes on in it and,
most important, that it can be scientifically investigated. They share a heady sense of excitement at
devising new techniques for finding out how the mind works, and they are beginning to derive a
series of richly explanatory theories about it.
Already, in fact, their ideas and findings have reverberated throughout American life. In the
universities, cognitive theory is rapidly displacing behaviorism as the guiding viewpoint of
psychology. More than a hundred institutions of higher learning now offer courses in how to think
better, based on recent research in problem solving and creativity. Behavior therapies remain
popular, but most behavior therapists are supplementing their treatment techniques with a goodly
dose of ''cognitive therapy'' -the exploration of the misperceptions and distortions of thought that
cause inappropriate responses to what other people say and do. Articles on various aspects of
cognitive science appear frequently in professional journals and popular science magazines, either
arousing or responding to (or both) a new interest on the part of the reading public in how the
human mind functions.
Cognitive science has had this much impact because it shows that, while the mind's processes cannot
be directly observed, they can be explo red by m eans of circumstantial evidence. Even as physicists
cannot see el ectrons, muons or other subatomic particles but infer their propert ies from the tracks
they leave in a cloud chamber, so cognitive sci entists deduce the nature of the mind's machinery
from what happens to information fed into it. Here are some recent experiments t hat, like cloud
chambers, reveal the tracks of thought: In a classr oom at the University of Washington, the
psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus recently showed a group of student volunteers a brief videota pe of
eight demonstrators bursting into and disrupting aclass. Afterw ard, she asked half of her subjects,
''Was the leader ofthe four demo nstrators a male?'' Speaking to the other subjects, she replaced ''fo
ur'' with ''12.'' A week later, she asked all of them how many demo nstrators they had seen: The
answers of the ''four'' group average d 6.4, but those of the ''12'' group averaged nearly nine. Dr. Lof
tus concluded that, in these kinds of situations, we do not retain bo th our original memories of
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events and subsequent information o r misinformation about them, but that the original memories
are amalgamated with and revised by later influences. Even under hypnosi s (as she found in
another experiment), the original experience ex ists nowhere in memory; we possess only the end
product. In a labora tory at the University of Pennsylvania, a 3-year-old girl watched as the child
psychologist Merry Bullock demonstrated a Snoopy jack-i n-the-box, a broad, flat wooden chest. Dr.
Bullock put asteel ball in a hole toward one side of the top. It rolled down a slanting runw ay, visible
to the child through a plastic front panel, and then disa ppeared; a second later, a Snoopy doll
popped up from the top of th e box in the direction the ball had been headed, as if triggered by it.
After the little girl had watched this performance several times , Dr. Bullock pulled the box apart (it
was made in sections); no w the ball rolled down in the first section and disappeared, but the
Snoopy doll in the central section, secretly activated by a button, continued to jump up, though the
ball could not possibly have got to it. The little girl burst out laughing and wriggled arou nd in her
chair. Dr. Bullock asked her what had happened. ''I don't know!'' she said, hunching up her skinny
little shoulders. At 3, she was too young to talk in terms of cause and effect or to understand such
words, but her surprise at s e eing a bizarre and seemingly uncaused event was evidence to Dr. B
ullock thatthe human mind is built so as to connect events causally l ong before it can deal verbally
with that sophisticated concept. In a psychology laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, a
student volunteer sat before a small video screen on which pairs of words appeared; his task was to
decide as quickly as possi ble whethereach pair belonged to the same semantic category. On came
these two: LION HORSE and he pushed a button indicating he thought they were ''Same.'' Then, on
came these two: LION APPLE and he indicated: ''Different.'' In each case, it had taken him about
three-quarters of a second to respond. Now the experimenters, Philip B. Gough and Michael J.
Cosky, flashed on the screen a single word (PEAR) and added another word (APPLE) less than a
second later. ''Same,'' answered the student - about a fifth of a second more quickly than before. The
difference, though minute, struck Gough and Cosky as extremely significant. They were trying to
deduce the steps by which we understand words we read and had hypothesized that before a word
can be understood it must be carried from the retina to a part of the brain where it is briefly retained
while we look up its meaning in our memory bank of words. If one word of a pair is shown to us
first, we should be able to look it up before the second one comes along; thus, the time needed to
decide ''Same'' or ''Different'' when the second word appears should be a trifle shorter than if both
appear at once. And that is exactly what they found. In such a mote of fact, a large principle can be
discerned: We ''process'' incoming information step by step, and what those steps are can be inferred
from the different amounts of time it takes us to do slightly different tasks. In scores of laboratories,
cognitive scientists use ''protocol analysis'' to deduce how the mind goes about the business of
solving a problem. The subject is presented with, say, an end game at chess or a problem in
cryptarithmetic (a mathematical puzzle in which digits have been replaced by letters; the task is to
break the code). Or it may be a real-life problem: Several researchers have been confronting
physicists, physicians, lawyers and engineers with the kinds of situations they deal with in their
professional capacities. The subject is asked to say out loud everything he or she is thinking while
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solving the problem. Then the protocol (the transcript of these utterances) is analyzed, step by step,
to show how the subject generated various hypotheses, made tentative forays in this or that
direction, backed away from unpromising avenues or blind alleys of thought and so on. The subject,
to be sure, voices only conscious thoughts - a small part of what is going on - but from these traces
the analyst conjectures what was going on in the subject's unconscious - for instance, whether he or
she was proceeding chiefly by trial and error or on the basis of stored information and how he or she
was ch oosing which of several alternatives to try first. The subject's total set of operating procedures
ca n then be written out in the form of a computer program and actually run on a machine. If the
machine deals with the problem much as the h uman being did, the researcher's overall analysis is
confirmed. At the Cent er for Human Information Processing of the University ofCalifornia at San
Diego, David E. Rumelhart has lately been telling rather dull l ittle stories to both children and
adults. One such story begins: ''Mary heard the ice-cream truck coming down the street. She
remembered her birthday money and ran into the house.'' At that point, Rumelhart stops and asks
his listeners what is happening; most of them recognize that Mary is a little girl, wants ice cream
when she hears the truck and goes into the house to get money for it. Isn't that obvious? Yes, but
where in the two sentences is any of these things actually said?
Rumelhart is looking into the way we understand one another's communications; we do so, he and
others are discovering, not just by hearing what people actually say but by making a set of
inferences, drawing upon our own extensive knowledge of the world, to supply what is missing. The
speaker or writer can count on us to come up with the right stuff, because knowledge in the memory
network is ''packaged'' in stereotypical routines or clusters of well-known cause-and-effect
relationships. (Think of all that is mutually understood in the exchange, ''Yeah?'' ''Yeah.'' ''Oh, yeah?''
''Yeah!'')
Long before the first stirrings of the cognitive-science revolution, many psychologists had been
troubled by the inability of behaviorism to explain a number of aspects of human behavior. Memory
was a case in point. Behaviorism dealt with it as if it were all of a piece: The organism remembers
best what has been most often repeated, best rewarded and so on. There was a nice clarity and
precision to this explanation; it was even turned into algebraic equations. But while the equations fit
most laboratory observations of rats and other animals, they did not fit everyday human experience,
which offers abundant evidence of two distinctly different forms of information storage - short-term
memory and long-term memory. We look up a telephone number for the 20th time, repe at it to
ourselves half a dozen times until we dial - and promptly fo rget it again. Yet much of what we have
experienced only once remains long or permanently in memory: the price we paid for a book, a joke
we found particularly funny, a special look on someone's face. Repe tition and reward are not a good
enough explanation of learning; in ternal cognitive factors- such as meaning - play a part.
Language was another area that cried out for explanations involving complex mental mechanisms
rather than simple rote learning. Children do imitate the speech they hear, but they do a lot more
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than that. As the linguist Noam Chomsky pointed out in 1959 in a withering critique of behaviorist
theories of language acquisition, children produce all sorts of sentences they have never heard
before. They create new sentences out of words they know, guided by some internal sense of syntax.
So do adults; every day each of us utters sentences he has never heard or read. Clearly, a lot does go
on inside and needs to be taken into account.
By the late 1950's, many such observations had caused pressure to build up among psychologists for
a new effort to explore the human mind. At the same time, a number of coincidental developments
in related fields of study were yielding insights into various aspects of mental functioning and
furnishing a wealth of bits of evidence about such thought processes as visualization, concept
formation, logical reasoning, language comprehension and problem solving. But each process
seemed to have its own rules; what was lacking was some unifying principle.
About two decades ago, such a principle began to emerge from information theory and computer
science. What a computer does from first to last is process information: It transforms punched-in
letters into digital bits, routes these to where they can be recognized or stored, retrieves them as
needed, puts them to work according to the program and the operator's commands, and eventually
changes them back into a readable display on a screen or on paper.
A few psychologists - among them, most notably Herbert A. Simon of Carnegie-Mellon University saw by analogy that the mind, too, was engaged in information processing; that was the overall
function of the separate mechanisms working within it.
If, for instance, you read the question ''What is the largest number that will go into 100 an odd
number of times (and more than once) with no remainder?'' you turn the perceived shapes of the
letters and words into neuronal impulses; then you compare them to stored shapes, sounds and
meanings in memory to identify them and decode the sense of the sentence; then you reason about
how to find such a number, try the numbers suggested by the method you chose and find one that
works; and finally you check your work. Each of these steps is part of an information-processing
program. (The answer, of course, is 20.)
Cognitive science is thus concerned with a system of processes for manipulating information; it is
this concept that has come, in recentyears, to uni fy and guide the new field.
(Brain research, though associated with cognitive science, deals with very different matters - the
electrical impulses or chemical signals, for instance, produced by individual neurons. Thought
processes are the highly organized product of millions or billions of these microevents; cognitive
science is concerned with the principles governing these higher-level structures, much as the study of
waves is concerned with wave mechanics and not the motions of water molecules.)
The practitioners of this new discipline sometimes betray an attitude that seems unusual for
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scientists: They are often awed by what they are studying. They rarely say so out loud, perhaps
fearing to sound insufficiently objective, but one can read that message between the lines of their
congested technical prose.
Occasionally, though, some cognitive scientist will actually come out with it. Prof. Rochel Gelman,
who specializes in childhood development at the University of Pennsylvania, said recently, ''The
human mind, as I see it in my work, is a wonderful, a magnificent structure created by evolution.
Nothing resembles it or comes close to it.'' Elliot Soloway, an artificial-intelligence researcher at
Yale, painstakingly worked out a computer program a while ago that could figure out some of the
simpler rules of baseball by watching a game being played. (It ''watched'' by ingesting a series of
numbers and symbols representing the physical movements of the players.) Soloway's aim was to
test his ideas about how human beings make sense of their experiences. ''The more I worked on it,''
he says, ''the more I was amazed that people can understand anything. It's really very hard to make
sense of the world - and yet we do. Even little kids do. It just blows me away!''
When cognitive scientists reckon the information capacity of the human memory, they come up with
numbers such as 1011 (100 billion) bits of information, a fact they are likely to offer, at least in
writing, in the calmest of tones. (The average adult's memory thus holds at least 500 times as much
information as the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.) But when they speak informally, they may let
their feelings slip. On e specialist in me mory research said to me, ''You couldn't fit into the biggest
compu ter now available all ofwhat a 4-year-old knows about his mother's ki tchen - the properties
of the furniture in it, what things will spil l and when, what actions will yield what results and so on,
an d on.'' He shook his head wonderingly.
But what is even more notable than the capacity of our memory is our ability to find what we need in
it. To retrieve a fact from a card file or a computer, you have to know how to locate it; if you don't
know how it has been classified and filed, it may as well not exist. The human memory, in contrast,
is organized not just alphabetically, numerically and topically but in innumerable ways; items in it,
research shows, are arranged in interlacing networks, with the result that practically any word, image
or other memory can be reached from any one of many starting points by a vast number of routes.
We are aware of that when we try to think of a forgotten word - we may cue ourselves with the first
letter, or its general sound, or its meaning, or a mental image of the last time we heard it used or
some other connection. Usually, though, we need not make a conscious effort; words are available to
us as fast as we wish to utter them. Artificial-intelligence researchers are envious of this human
ability. As Hans Berliner at Carnegie-Mellon University put it, ''Human beings can store large
amounts of knowledge - and get at it. Computers have a lot of trouble doing that.'' He paused, and
then added, ''In fact, the problem of having a computer find its way around in its memory'' - as a
human being does - ''is pretty close to hopeless.''
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Research in problem solving similarly offers many opportunities to be impressed by the machinery
inside the head. Prof. Paul E. Johnson of the University of Minnesota is one of the researchers who
have been investigating how experts in highly technical professions solve their problems. They do so,
he finds, not by an orderly and stepwise method, as in solving a puzzle or playing a game, but by a
far more complicated, hard-to-fathom, yet efficient, method.
For instance, a cardiologist, presented with a fragmentary case history as a problem in diagnosis, is
likely to break in with a correct answer after hearing just a few scraps of data. At that point,
according to Johnson, ''We say to him, 'How did you know? With only three pieces of data, how
could you possibly know?' And it turns out he doesn't really know, but he has a good hypothesis,
based on experience and knowledge special to this domain, that consists of shortcuts and tricks. But
the expert can't tell you how he does what he does. As he was growing proficient, he had to think
about what he was doing, then he went through a phase where he was practicing these hookups, and
finally he got to the stage of automaticity, where all that stuff is filed away out of sight. So he says,
'You can't reduce diagnosis to rules. It's an art - I just do it.' ''What he c an't tell us - but what we're
finding out - is that he'sdoing top-dow n and bottom-up thinking at the same time. He's seeing
things in a g eneral way but also in a highly specific way, using his tremendous ne twork of
experiential associations and relying on his intuitive jud gments.'' Then, beaming, Johnson exclaims,
''In our solving of pr oblems, we're not logical machines, we're psychological machines!''
All of these issues are what cognitive scientists often refer to as ''interesting questions.'' They use
that term in a special sense to mean issues that are not just attention-getting but important, not yet
fully understood and, above all, difficult to deal with.
Every science has its own similarly interesting questions, but cognitive science is willing to take on indeed, by its nature cannot escape -ideas that have intrigued and puzzled thoughtful people through
the ages.
One of them is the ancient nature-nurture issue. One doctrine, dating back at least to Plato, holds
that our minds come equipped with innate ideas or, at any rate, inherited tendencies to think and
behave in very specific ways. The opposite doctrine, held by the behaviorists and their philosophical
predecessors the empiricists, maintains that the mind is a blank slate at birth and comes to think
only in ways that have been written upon it by experience and training.
Cognitive science has been turning up a good deal of evidence that both sides are partly right and
largely wrong. Recent research suggests that our minds come equipped with highly efficient neural
arrangements built into us by evolution; these predispose us to make certain kinds of sense of our
experiences and to use them in that distinctively human activity we call thinking. It is the product of
an interaction between nature and nurture; each is essential, neither is wholly controlling.
This is abundantly evident in the studies of language acquisition by children. It is experience that
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causes children to learn the language they hear - yet they would learn none were it not for the builtin machinery that prepares them to reproduce what they hear and that enables them to make order
out of the verbal chaos around them.
Babies begin to babble at 3 or 4 months of age, and their babb ling increases until they start to form
understand able words, at which point it decreases. Parents naturally take th e babbling to be an
attempt to imitate adult speech, but they are wrong: Studies of deaf children show that they, too,
babble. Evident ly, it is a spontaneous,hereditary activity that begins when the neur al centers
directing it have reached a certain stage of maturation. I t is a necessary preliminary to speech, and
in normal children it changes and increasingly comes to include the sounds of t he spoken language.
In deaf children, however, it dwindles away from lack of feedback. Here,then, is evidence that both
nature and nurtur e are involved in human mental development - not X percent from one a nd Y
percent from the other, but the two interacting to produce the result.
Another way in which our minds are predisposed to organize the welter of incoming experience is by
recognizing patterns in the events around us. Even the tiny child is captivated by the meter and
rhyme of verse and will respond to strong musical rhythm by dancing. We build on that inherent
capability. A third grader, without being told what to look for or why, will notice the ways the
numbers are changing in this simple problem and solve it without trouble: What number comes
next? 2 3 5 6 8 9 - An adult, with much more experience, can handle far more complicated
problems, such as this one: What are the next letters? A B R S Z B C T U Y -* (FOLLOWING LINE
IS A FOOTNOTE:) *The answer is C D V W X. Our native sensitivity to patterns accounts for a great
many human discoveries -everything from primitives' recognition of the cycle of the seasons to
present-day astronomers' perception of the way the galaxies are dispersed throughout the universe.
We human beings, moreover, are concept-making creatures: Unlike any other animal, we have a
natural ability to group objects or events together into categories, give them abstract labels and so
think about the world in a highly efficient way. The interesting aspect of this question is how we
acquire the concepts by which we do our higher-level thinking. No doubt we acquire most of them
from other people: The parent explains to the child that ''animal'' means cat, dog, mouse and the
like; the professor explains to the student the meaning of significant correlation or, perhaps,
romantic love. But a number of recent studies indicate that the human mind is capable of forming
categories on its own, without outside help. Researchers showed 1-year-olds slides picturing pieces
of furniture, two at a time. After a long series of such slides, they switched to one showing an item of
furniture and a face; almost always, the child would look at the face rather than the piece of
furniture. But if they showed a series of pairs of faces first, then a slide of a face and a piece o f
furniture, the child would prefer the latter. Apparently ev en a 1-year-old child is able to categorize
the objects he or she see s and takes more interest in something from a new category than from an
old one.
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Recently, at the Human Performance Center of the University of Michigan, the cognitive
psychologists Lisbeth Fried and Keith Holyoak made up a number of slides of abstract geometrical
patterns. They had started with two somewhat similar basic designs and, on a computer, generated a
number of variations that differed from the original in varying degrees. Then they told a group of
volunteers that they would be seeing designs by two minimalist artists and were to try to distinguish
the work of one from the other - that is, sort them into two groups.
As the designs were projected one by one, the volunteers made a choice by pushing one of two
buttons. The researchers told some of them whether each choice was right or wrong as they made it;
not surprisingly, these people quickly got better at the job. The researchers told the others nothing yet this group, with no corrective feedback, got better at the job virtually as fast. Drs. Fried and
Holyoak concluded that our minds file away incoming experiences in such a way that similarities
overlap and we shortly perceive what is typical in a group of related things. We automatically create
and refine.
Once again, therefore, it appears that, as one cognitive scientist put it, ''We're hard-wired to make
certain kinds of sense out of the world.'' (''Hard-wired'' is a computer-science term that refers to
built-in traits, resulting from fixed circuitry rather than programming.) Unlike the lower animals, we
human beings have very few specific behavior patterns built into us; we are not constrained by our
hard-wiring to eat only certain foods, build only one kind of shelter or make love in a single fashion.
But we are constrained by our mental hard-wiring to make certain kinds of order out of our
experiences. Constraints, however, are not always limitations; they can also be capabilities - and
those that are built into the human brain are our greatest asset, for they force us to construct the
human intellect.
Another classic question that cognitive science i s looking into is the matter of whether the human
mind arrives at knowledge by means oflogical reasoning or in some other fashion. E ver since
Aristotle's time, many philosophers have thought that ded uctive reasoning was theroad to truth. In
our own time, the immensely influential psychologist Jean Piaget maintained that logi c was the
natural mode of human reasoning and that every child inevi tably developed logical reasoning by the
early teens. Not every paren t would agree.
Cognitive scientists have more cogent reasons for thinking that logic is not the normal mode of
human thought. For one thing, in logic every statement is true or false, but in real life many
statements are neither. If someone says, ''John's wife is sick,'' and in fact John is unmarried, the
statement is simply irrelevant, a condition the mind recognizes but logic does not. Again, with logic
we can derive innumerable valid but useless inferences from any true statement - and nothing
within the system of logic guides us to avoid such inferences. (For example, if it's true that ''Roses
are red,'' then it's equally true that ''It isn't true that it isn't true that either roses are red or they
aren't red.'')
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More to the point, the evidence shows that our ''natural reasoning,'' as cognitive scientists call it,
proceeds by quite other means. In everyday life we reason most of the time by noting similarities
between things, making good guesses and reaching conclusions on the basis of likelihood or
probability rather than logical certainty.
The psychologist Allan Collins, senior scientist at the Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm of Bolt
Beranek & Newman Inc., has spent years studying natural (or, as he calls it, ''plausible'') reasoning.
He has tried a number of little problems on various subjects and asked them to talk out loud while
thinking the problems through. From their answers, Collins has identified hundreds of common
kinds of plausible inferences - the fundamental forms of everyday reasoning - one of which actually
consists of reasoning not from knowledge but from the lack of it. ''Is the Nile longer than the
Mekong River?'' he asked, and one young man said he thought it was, because in junior high school
he read a book on rivers, and he remembered reading about the Nile and the Amazon but not about
the Mekong. He was saying, in effect, that because he didn't know whether or not it was long, it
probably wasn't.
Most of our plausible reasoning relies on the intuitive recognition of similarities or analogies
between two things. ''We reason analogically,'' says Robert J. Sternberg of Yale, ''whenever we make
a decision about something new in our experience by drawing a parallel to something old.'' In most
cases, the reasoning is invalid by strictly logical rules - but intuitively we know better. And most of
the time we are right; were it not so, we would long since have become extinct. A very old example of
such reasoning is Virgil's story of how Dido founded Carth age: She was granted as much land as she
could enclose with an ox hi de - which she cleverly cut into long thin strips and laid out as a circle,
the largest area that can be enclosed by a lineof given leng th. But how did she know that was the
optimum shape? Intuitively, no doubt, based on analogy with such similar experiencesas tying as m
any sticks as possible into a bundle with a piece of string.
A more recent example: A couple of years ago at M.I.T., I was talking to the physicist Andrea di
Sessa, who had been studying how high-school and college students think about physics problems.
He diagramed on his blackboard a pulley with a rope running over it and down each side; at one end
of the rope he drew a monkey and at the other end, a box representing a weight. The two weighed
the same, he said. Ignoring friction, what would happen to the weight if the monkey climbed the
rope?
Grasping at a straw of thought, I said, ''Well, the energy he expends has to go someplace, so I guess
the weight rises as high as he climbs.''
''That's right, it does,'' said di Sessa. I felt pleased. ''And many students get the right answer,'' he
went on, ''but can't explain how they got it - or, like you, get it right for the wrong reasons.'' I felt
less pleased. (The problem concerns the laws of motion: Since the forces acting on the two objects,
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both initially at rest, are always equal, their motions must be. Viewing the problem as one of the
conservation of energy, as I did, may lead to the right answer but ought not to.)
Creativity - in the arts or any other area - is yet another classic issue that is gaining scientific
respectability, thanks to cognitive science. Until recently, the investigation of creativity was carried
on by a variety of dabblers from the arts and assorted sciences, plus a handful of nonbehaviorist
psychologists. Some of them devised tests that identified who was creative - but not why they were
or how they managed to do what they did. Others collected accounts of creative experiences that
entertained but hardly explained. A famous example: The 19th-century German chemist Friedrich
Kekule had been laboring long, and in vain, to figure out the structure of the benzene molecule.
Exhausted, he sank into a reverie, staring into the fire, when a vision came to him of a snake biting
its own tail and he realized that the core of the benzene molecule was a ring of carbon atoms. But
how or why this vision came to him he could not say.
Much of the older writing about creativity seems to regard it as describable but ineffable - an almost
magical or spiritual act. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, regard it not as something unlike the rest of
cognition but as a special kind of problem solving - the kind that yields answers to new problems, or
new answers to old ones. (The question of to what degree creativity takes place in the right brain
rather than in the left brain is not of much interest to cognitive scientists. The real question, they
feel, is how the brain, whatever half is involved, comes up with new ideas.)
One current approach to exploring creativity uses protocol analysis: John R. Hayes and Linda
Flower, at Carnegie-Mellon University, have been asking subjects to voice all their thoughts while
writing an essay. From the analysis of the trains of thought thus captured, Drs. Hayes and Flower
have been able to portray the steps involved in writing in the form of a flow chart containing a score
of little boxes (each box represents a mental function) connected by arrows. It seems to indicate that
creative work, at least at the conscious level, involves a far more orderly set of procedures than many
artistic people like to think.
New ideas, however, pop into this system from the unconscious, an area the chart leaves unmapped
thus far. How or when the unconscious is at its most creative is still largely conjectural, but other
studies suggest that one important condition is that the goal of the problem be ''ill defined'' - that is,
general, not specific. If a ship designer, for example, defines his goal as the more economical use of
fuel in cargo vessels, he will fidget with and improve the boilers, the propellers and the hull shape.
But if he defines it as moving the boat through the water more cheaply, he may be freed to think of
going back to wind power, using mechanical sails, as the Japanese and others are beginning to do.
But loosely defining the goal will not help unless, at the same time, the mind is packed with
pertinent information. Current problem-solving research, Hayes told me, stresses the relationship
between knowledge and creativity. ''Take that famous figure,'' he said, ''worked up by Herb Simon,
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7/15/11 9:59 PM
that the chess master has learned and stored in memory 50,000 patterns of positions on the board.
What that says to me is that to generate creative answers to problems, you need many years of
experience and hard work and a lot of information. We have studied composers' lives, and I claim
that the magic number is 10 - that is, 10 years between the time a composer starts intensive study
and the time the first notable compositions appear. It was true of Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert
and others - I have a sample of 76 - but, of course, that amount of time and effort is only a necessary
condition, no t a sufficient one. There are innumerable poor slobs wh o can spend the same amount
of time and effort and stillnot produce a creative work of any magnitude.''
Finally, several researchers have noticed that the human mind seems most capable of creativity when
motivated, not by the hope of reward, but by the intrinsic joy of finding new answers to a problem.
In one typical study, a group of students were told that they would earn a reward for thinking up the
largest number of plot titles and stories; a second group, not promised any payoff, proved to be
more imaginative and original than the first. Highly creative people, of course, hope for financial
and social success, but one student of creativity, Dr. Teresa M. Amabile of Brandeis University,
suggests that they may be able to shut out the thought of reward while working. In any case, the
findings imply that most of us are at our most creative when playing with ideas for the sheer
pleasure of it rather than out of need or greed. It is one of the paradoxes and splendors of the human
intellect.
Perhaps the most intractable of the old problems of the mind has been the question of the
homunculus. Who or what is that? Let me quote Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix,
who now is doing research in neurobiology. Writing in Scientific American, he tells of trying to
explain to an intelligent woman why it was puzzling that we perceive anything at all: ''She could not
see why there was a problem. Finally in despair I asked her how she herself thought she saw the
world. She replied that she probably had somewhere in her head something like a little television set.
'So who,' I asked, 'is looking at it?' She now saw the problem immediately.''
This is, in fact, not one problem but two. The first is philosophy's ancient puzzle about mind and
body. The homunculus, literally ''little man,'' is a symbol for something other than brain inside the
brain - something incorporeal, a bodiless watcher and operator of the mechanism. There are, of
course, serious difficulties in the ancient dualist position that mind or spirit exists apart from body
or material things. Most cognitive scientists are untroubled by these difficulties because they simply
do not believe in incorporeal substance. And for good reason: In science, a theory is not considered
worthy of belief unless it can be put to tests that would prove it false if it were, indeed, false. The
theory that the earth is round, for instance, is falsifiable, but the tests that might falsify it do not do
so; that makes it credible. The assertion that unicorns exist is not f alsifiable -what test could
disprove that claim? - so is unworthy of belief. The same i s true of the notion that mind is a
separate form of existence, ap art from body.
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But if mind is not an incorporeal something, what is it? The general answer of cognitive scientists,
drawn from modern philosophy, computer theory and information theory, is that the thought
processes that make up the mind are organizations of millions and billions of neural events; these
organizations are higher-order events or entities known as epiphenomena. A flame is the composite
organized effect of innumerable chemical events at the molecular level; in much the same way, the
mind is the composite effect of innumerable events at the neuronal and molecular level. To clarify
this thought, here is a simple example of an epiphenomenon (my thanks to Douglas R. Hofstadter,
from whose book ''Godel, Escher, Bach'' I borrowed the idea): NNNNN E E UUUUU R R OOOOO N
N SSSSS N E E U U R R O N N S
N EEEEE U U R R O OOO NNNNN S
NEEUURROONNS
N E E UUUUU RRRRR OOOOO N N S
Now to the second problem: How can this epiphenomenon, mind, be conscious of itself? A lens is
used to see other objects, but it cannot see itself; if the mind is made up of thought processes, how
does it manage to perceive itself? If it consists of thoughts, how can it experience itself as something
unique? Whence comes the ''I'' that is unarguably real to each of us? This entrancing and murky
subject, long considered fit only for philosophers, is now given serious consideration by cognitive
scientists, at least at the level of hypothesis if not experiment.
Some of them say that consciousness of self is an interaction effect -it is what happens when one part
of the mind interacts with another: an epi-epiphenomenon, so to speak.
Others say it is a feedback effect -what Hofstadter calls a ''strange loop of the mind,'' a selfreinforcing resonance. ''The self,'' he writes, ''comes into being at the moment it has the power to
reflect itself.'' We are aware of our thoughts, but the awareness is itself a thought and the foundation
of consciousness.
A somewhat different way of saying much the same thing comes from child-development studies. As
the child grows, it becomes aware of two worlds - the one outside and the one within. Throughout
life we continually experience the difference: We see the face across the table, but we can also see it
in the mind's eye - and recognize which is whic h. It is this experience of both the outer world and
ourinternal vers ion of it that results in our awareness of ourselves.
Thus has Descartes's fundamental premise, ''I think; therefore I am,'' been translated into
contemporary terms and philosophy been put back into science.
Illustrations: diagram of the Semantic Network problem solving diagram photo of Merry Bullock
with 3-year-old in cause and effect test photo of Andrea Di Sessa diagram of memory as information
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processor drawing of cat, human and computer thoughts

Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company
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How The Mind Works (The Universe Within - A New Science Explores The Human Mind)

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HOW THE MIND WORKS - The New York Times

January 24, 1982