Sunday e-mail 3rd March

Sort of a guest appearance from Batman; five very interesting bullet points...

Let’s start with a serious welcome and thank you to all our new subscribers! A round of applause for you and your wise decisions. I know you joined with big expectations - and hope you are mentally prepared for the even bigger, better reality that is…Crime & Psychology! Feel free to get in touch if there’s anything in the area you’d like to learn more about, or anything you’d like to see on the site. I’ll be delighted to help if I can.

But enough of these garrulous greetings! I know you’re panting to hear what I’ve got lined up for you this week. Well, pity my poor postman, who has been puffing his way to my door beneath the weight of the lachrymose letters you have sent, lamenting the fact that you had to wait a week – yes, a whole week! – for Part 2 of our short series entitled ‘What We Think About When We Think About Crime’. Fear not. The very same will be appearing as if by magic in your e-mail this Wednesday. Brace yourself for another terrific trip round the inside of the human head. We’ll discuss illusions, perceptions, why you need to dress well for a court appearance, and the reason why things that go bump in the night are so much scarier than those that go bump in the daytime. There will even be a special guest appearance from Batman, no less!

I know you can barely wait, so thought I’d use this opportunity to fill in a little background – you know, just in case you’ve caught the Cognitive Psychology bug and would like to know more. I’m ever ready and eager to please.

And so to this week’s five bullet points. Each one indicates an incredibly important instant in the history of cognitive science. And if this admittedly abbreviated adumbration leaves you hungry for more, just drop me a line. I’ll be not only happy but positively thrilled to recommend some riotous and raucous remedial reading!

Let me hook you up to the knowledge pump:

1.      BEHAVIOURISM: This approach to Psychology became popular in the early decades of the last century. The guiding philosophy was to have no philosophy at all: let’s just observe the behaviour of rats, mice, and human beings in order to work out what they do and how they learn. The mind was a black box. To speculate about it was to do just that – speculate – and no serious scientist had any business doing that. Behaviourism seemed like such a good idea, and yet… Certain simple experiments on rats running round mazes actually ended up causing problems for this whole approach, and so too did…

2.      TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR: The great academic, Noam Chomsky, published a book in 1957 with the exciting title, Syntactic Structures. It was a proper page-turner: a thrilling roller-coaster ride into the question of why languages work the way they do (earlier linguists had been sensible enough to leave the topic well enough alone till Chomsky came along to do it for them). The important point was that grammar worked by means of algorithms (that’s ‘rules’ to you and me). While, on the surface, all languages may look different, their fundamental structure is the same. Language, by its nature, involves stored bodies of information than can be tranformed by means of rules. That may not sound like much to you and me, but it sounded deadly to the Behaviourists - who didn’t think we should study the mind at all, remember – and very exciting indeed to those psychologists, influenced by Computer Science, who were busy developing….

3.      SYMBOL-PROCESSING MODELS: By the 1950s, psychologists had started to study the mind by analogy with a computer. Part of the reason is that, of course, Computer Science was just getting off the ground at the same time. A paper by Claude E Shannon in 1948 had shown that information could be measured. Psychologists like George Miller and Donald Broadbent eagerly set about working out how much of that measurable information your mind could handle. The ‘black box’ was open! Behaviourists wailed and gnashed their teeth.

4.      CONNECTIONIST MODELS: Most cognitive scientists were quite happy with the flowcharts and arrows that characterised their shiny new symbol-processing models. They represented information flow, after all, and wasn’t that what mattered? Others, though, liked to ask sarcastic questions: ‘What happens in the boxes?’ and ‘What goes down the arrows?’ Unfortunately, the reply (‘Oh, shut up’) turned out not to be what they were after, so they went away and created new, mathematical tools for studying thought. They showed how networks (such as those made by the neurones in your brain) can be ‘trained’, through experience, to respond in specific ways to particular kinds of experience. In other words, they showed, by means of numbers, how learning seems to happen.

5.      HEBBIAN LEARNING: Thought has a physical structure. Along with various famous colleagues, the neuroscientist, Donald Hebb, showed that the physical structure of the brain changes when you learn. That, again, may bring computers to mind. After all, when you add new hardware, your laptop ‘learns’ to do new things, such as, say, print letters, or transmit happy melodies to your ears. The brain is made of neurones, just as the important parts of your laptop are made of semi-conductors. ‘Neurones that fire together, wire together’, they say –you may have heard that the hippocampus in the brains of taxi-drivers are larger than those in the brains of regular people, like you and me, who sometimes get lost in big cities.

No tour of Cognitive Psychology could be quicker! But if you’re new to the area, I hope it sharpened your appetite. Never fear, on Wednesday there will be no test, just a fascinating flurry of further fabulous facts!

Till then, thanks for visiting! Go on, bleep a bright blue button:

Images courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.