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This site contains texts that I wrote about cognitive psychology, by which I
mean the investigation of the way thinking (in its widest definition) is done.
I started with a model of the way the human cognition works, and then
added texts discussing points that have arisen from various comments I got.
If you are not familiar with scientific practice, you should read this first.
All the texts in this site in a zip file (0.9Mb), gzipped tar file (0.7Mb, out
of date)
The main point that distinguishes my model from other models is that I try
to make it plausible neurobiologically. By 'neurobiologically' I mean the
characteristics of neurons and their connectivity in the brain. Very very
briefly, the main logic is:
(a) Humans think in the cortex.
(b) The connectivity inside the cortex is mostly stochastic (varies randomly
across individuals).
(c) Therefore the thinking system is not specified by the genes, i.e. not
innate.
(d) Hence what is innate is a learning system.
As far as I can see, all the current models of human thinking ignore
neurobiology, and more than that, they are neurobiologically implausible,
because they ignore the stochastic nature of the low-level connectivity of
neurons. See brain symbols for a discussion showing that symbolic systems
are implausible because of this reason. This text was first submitted for
publication in Apr96 and got quite impressive reviews. If reading these
reviews will not convince you that the current cognitive science is rotten,
nothing will.
The stochastic connectivity in the cortex is 'hidden' from the rest of the
public by neuroscientists, and here are online examples. [2Oct98] I have
submited a short letter to neuroscientists calling them to advertise the
stochastic connectivity of the cortex. [19Aug2001] A recent paper in
Science gives the impression that they found precise connectivity in the
cortex, but a closer inspection shows they didn't. It also gives a good
example of how the public is being mis-informed about the subject.
New methods, like PET and fMRI, open new avenues in investigation of the
brain. However, currently the results are not replicable, and there is a strong
tendency to overinterpret the results, and worse, to avoid any discussion of
these overinterpretations. I was trying to publish a paper that shows the lack
of replicability in PET and fMRI. By now, the page also contains links to
the many reviews that the paper got, which are also quite impressive. There
is also a general discussion of cognitive brain imaging here, and here is an
example of what happens when you try to challenge these
overinterpretations. [6 Aug 2007] These pages are by now quite old, but the
facts that they higlight haven't change: there is no studies in cognitive brain
imaging which are reproducible acorss individuals in the details that they
show. Only gross anatomy is reproducible (sometimes).
The most frequent criticism that I got about 'brain symbols' is that the
models that it criticizes are 'computational', and therefore do not need to be
implementable. This is based on Marr's ideas, as expressed in his book
Vision, though in somewhat distorted way. As a result, I wrote a Critique of
Vision by Marr, which, if you find Marr's ideas useful, is guaranteed to raise
your blood pressure.
The model itself is here. In short, it starts from the assumption that humans
are not born with a thinking system, which is almost direct corollary of the
stochastic connectivity of the cortex. Instead, humans are born with a
learning system, which learns how to think. The model describes the
learning system. Experience showed that people that haven't understood the
point of stochastic connectivity in the cortex and its implications cannot
actually see the point of the model, so unless you have read these pages
(above), you are probably wasting time trying to read the model itself.
The model's text does not contain a reference list. In Cognitive Psychology
Reading I explain why, and suggest how to go about learning more about
cognitive psychology.
Here are the most negative messages I got about this site.
[6 Aug 2007] I still don't mush progress. Here I list what I see as actual
progress in the field.
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