New Science Of Mind Research Articles

The Field of Consciousness and Extended Cognition

Extended cognition theorists claim that the definition of cognition can be extended to include not only the brain, but also the body and environment. In a series of works, Mark Rowlands has envisioned a new science of mind that explores the externalism of consciousness and cognition. This paper connects Rowlands’ work with the phenomenology of Aron Gurwitsch. It shows how Gurwitsch’s field of consciousness, in particular his conception of the marginal halo, can provide a distinct, organized way of thinking about extended cognition. A key question considered is from where do cognitive processes project and disclose meanings? By thinking of location as locus—a projecting pathway of points of intentional opportunity—organization in extended cognition becomes organization in a field of consciousness. The marginal halo in the field of consciousness is articulated as this locus of intentionality, what Rowlands (The new science of the mind: from extended mind to embodied phenomenology, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2010) calls “the noneliminable intentional core”. Problems of cognitive bloat and personal character are addressed in light of the findings. In addition to situating Gurwitsch’s work within the extended mind movement for the first time, this study highlights the importance of the marginal halo, largely neglected in previous Gurwitsch scholarship.

Erratum to: Introduction

Although the Introduction mentions Patrick Maynard’s ‘‘Our Graphic Minds: Graphic Cognitive Artifacts and the New Science of Mind’’, this article was not published in this special issue. Further, Jorge Marques da Silva and Elena Casetta’s paper was titled as ‘‘A Tentative Evaluation of Plant Physiology’s Potential to Engage in Transdisciplinary Research’’ in the Introduction. However, the title should read as ‘‘The Evolutionary Stages of Plant Physiology and a Plea for Transdisciplinarity’’ as published in the article.

Book Section: Essays and Review: In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

Book Section: Essays and Review: In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

Eric Kandel and the New Science of Mind

Eric Kandel and the New Science of Mind

Kandel’s “New Science of Mind” for Psychiatry and the Limits to Reductionism: A Critical Review

If the first half of the 20th century was the golden age of physics and the second half, from the elucidation of DNA in 1953 to the description of the human genome, was dominated by molecular biology, many people believe that the most exciting progress in the 21st century will be directed toward a rational account of the ultimate scientific mystery, the human mind (Carr, 2006). From the psychiatric point of view, this will not come too soon: by one measure on intellectual achievement, the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine, modern psychiatry has made little impression. Even though mental health is the most important single cause of morbidity and secondary mortality in the world, there have been only two awards directed toward matters of psychiatry since they were instituted in 1901. Thus, when the author of a book titled Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and the New Biology of Mind (Kandel, 2005) is billed as "the first American psychiatrist ever to have won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and only the second psychiatrist to have done so in the prize's 102 year history," psychiatrists may at last feel they are coming out of the shadows. In this article, I look at one author's concept of a single idea in psychiatry. However, the idea dominates modern psychiatry, and the writer is extremely influential. The author, Eric Kandel, offers the view that "radical reductionism" will convert psychiatry and psychoanalysis into genuinely scientific fields. I argue instead that reductionism is a restricted model of science that can never account for the entirety of human behavior. PSYCHIATRY AND THE PRIZEWINNERS The first psychiatric Nobel award was in 1927 when the Austrian neuropsychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg was named for his discovery of the effects of malaria-induced fevers on the progression of tertiary syphilis, or general paresis of the insane. He had published his results in 1917, but his interest in the use of artificial fevers in treating psychosis dated from at least 1887, when he was attached to the university clinic in Vienna. He also worked on treating thyroid diseases and cretinism with iodine, but this was long before modern biochemistry made accurate measurements of hormones possible. His conviction that fevers could improve psychotic states was fanciful if not dangerous. His major discovery was fortuitous and is of no interest to psychiatry today. The next mention was in 1949 when Antonio Egas Moniz (1874-1955) was jointly honored for his work in psychosurgery. Egas Moniz was a Portuguese professor of neuro-surgery who, remarkably, also sat in parliament and, as foreign minister, led his country's delegation to the Versailles conference in 1919. In the mid-1920s, after serving as ambassador to Spain, he returned to medicine and adapted the new techniques of contrast angiography to the brain, quickly gaining an international reputation. In 1935, he attended a conference in London at which two researchers showed how cutting certain frontal tracts in chimpanzees' brains resulted in increased tractability. Intrigued, he decided to apply this to mental patients. The results of the initial series of 20 patients were considered encouraging, and the procedure was widely copied. For example, in England and Wales, more than 10,000 leucotomies were performed between 1942 and 1954. The figure was much higher in the United States, but, with the advent of powerful tranquillizing drugs, people lost interest in psychosurgery, and it soon fell into disrepute (which probably would have happened anyway). Egas Moniz was not a psychiatrist: He was a neurosurgeon who applied his techniques to a psychiatric population. A reviewer at the official Web site of the Nobel Prize stated, "I think there is no doubt that Moniz deserved the Nobel Prize" (Jansson, 1998), but these days, few psychiatrists would agree. By modern standards, the work that led to these prizes would not meet the most elementary standards of what constitutes reasoned research, let alone ethical conduct. …

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (review)

Reviewed by: In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind Laura Otis Eric R. Kandel . In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. xv + 510 pp. Ill. $29.95 (0-393-05863-8). In Search of Memory will join James Watson's The Double Helix and Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Recollections of My Life as one of the most readable scientific life stories. Superbly written, Eric Kandel's narrative "interweaves" his own emergence as a scientist with the development of contemporary neuroscience (p. xv). It is simultaneously a moving autobiography, a lucid introduction to neuroscience, and a persuasive argument that mind is inseparable from brain. [End Page 238] As Kandel describes his quest to understand consciousness through history, medicine, psychoanalysis, and molecular neurobiology, he demonstrates the interdependence of science, politics, and personal life. His search for memory begins with his family's flight from Nazi-occupied Austria and ends with his demand that the Austrians acknowledge their role in expelling and murdering Jews. Although he presents his motivation as scientific curiosity, he frames his search with episodes illustrating what we must never forget. In Search of Memory celebrates science, especially American science, as a free, egalitarian realm in which anything can happen. He presents it as a group activity that proceeds through collaborations in an international community. In his narrative, some fields develop in the most exciting ways when they merge with others perceived as different but trying to answer similar questions. Other disciplines, such as psychoanalysis, stagnate when they refuse to acknowledge their affinities to different ways of studying human thought. While Kandel says disappointingly little about the day-to-day practice of science, he offers a highly informative overview of the way that sciences of mind have developed throughout the twentieth century. For those starting careers in science, Kandel has invaluable wisdom. Describing his decision to leave mammalian brains and use the marine snail Aplysia as a model system, he writes that he had learned from marriage "to trust one's instincts, one's unconscious, one's creative urge" (p. 149). When his long hours in the laboratory threatened his marriage, he learned that "hard thinking . . . is much more valuable than simply running more experiments" (p. 162). In his final advice to young scientists, he writes that it is better to "lose some years trying something new" than to do the same experiments everyone else is doing (p. 427). The entire story of his scientific life conveys the benefits of taking risks. Kandel has not written a history of neuroscience, and his picture of science past distorts the record somewhat by focusing on a few great individuals rather than on complex collaborations. No one would quarrel with his choices of Hermann Helmholtz and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, but Emil du Bois-Reymond's electrophysiology and Wilhelm His's neuroembryology should be mentioned in conjunction with those scientists' work. For the most part, Kandel succeeds in combining his personal and scientific narratives. His life story provides the driving force in the opening and conclusion but languishes in the middle, when the book becomes an introduction to the science of mind. If anything, the story flows too smoothly. It is hard to believe that any scientist's life could have been so untroubled, and one wishes that Kandel had described the dead ends, the waste, the feuds, and the frustrations so that readers could learn from them as well as from his successes. Overall, however, his story strikes the reader as optimistic, not censored. He has experienced science as exhilarating, and that is what he wants to convey. In an era in which science has received more than its share of criticism, he shows us that there really is such a thing as progress. While reminding readers not to forget the past, In Search of Memory urges us to consider what neuroscience may achieve in this century. Laura Otis Emory University Copyright © 2008 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Being Where? Andy Clark and the Problem of Advanced Cognition

Andy Clark (1989, 1993, 1997) is a leading philosophical exponent of a view of mind as an ‘associative engine’, or connectionist pattern-completer, composed of multiple special-purpose modules that communicate in only limited ways and eschew detailed forms of internal representation. The modules, Clark and his allies argue, are both coordinated and integrated by the enviromnent, whilst ‘off-loading’ onto it by calling on external computational resources (‘external scaffolds’) to reduce cognitive load. Defenders of this position further maintain that even examples of sophisticated and distinctively human cognition, such as long-term planning or running a multi-national company, emerge from coimectionist pattern-completing brains in the ‘constraining presence of public language, culture and institutions’ (1997: 33). This constellation of ideas, Clark argues, amounts to a completely new science of mind that radically reforms ‘our whole way of thinking about intelligent behaviour’. Unfortunately, this rhetoric far outstrips the evidence: while a reasonable case can be made that external scaffolds are necessary for many types of cognition, the assertion that pattern-completion plus external scaffolding is a sufficient explanation of all human cognition has not been demonstrated. The insufficiency of the Clarkian view is particularly evident in the case of advanced cognition in the economic sphere.

In search of memory—the emergence of a new science of mind

In search of memory—the emergence of a new science of mind

Book Review: "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of the New Science of Mind", A Brand Snatched from the Fire, Eric Kandel (2006)

Journal of Integrative NeuroscienceVol. 06, No. 01, pp. 219-226 (2007) Book ReviewNo AccessBook Review: "In Search of Memory: The Emergence of the New Science of Mind", A Brand Snatched from the Fire, Eric Kandel (2006)Otto HutterOtto HutterOtto Hutter is formerly Regius Professor of Physiology in the University of Glasgow. He was born in Vienna and came to England in 1983 by Kindertransport. He has published on neuromuscular and synaptic transmission, on the nervous control of the heart and biophysical topics. Search for more papers by this author https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219635207001428Cited by:0 Previous AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsRecommend to Library ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail W. W. Norton and Co. Ltd., ISBN 0393058638. FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Recommended Vol. 06, No. 01 Metrics History PDF download

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. By Eric R Kandel. New York: W. W. Norton. $29.95. xv + 510 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0–393–05863–8. 2006.

Previous articleNext article No AccessNeural SciencesIn Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. By Eric R Kandel. New York: W. W. Norton. $29.95. xv + 510 p; ill.; index. ISBN: 0–393–05863–8. 2006.Paul TibbettsPaul TibbettsCognitive Science, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio Search for more articles by this author Cognitive Science, University of Dayton, Dayton, OhioPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Quarterly Review of Biology Volume 81, Number 4December 2006 Published in association with Stony Brook University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/511610 Views: 11Total views on this site Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

In search of memory: the emergence of a new science of mind

In search of memory: the emergence of a new science of mind

A Review of: “In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind”

A Review of: “In Search of Memory. The Emergence of a New Science of Mind”

From Austria, Through Aplysia , Toward the Mind

In Search of Memory . The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. By Eric R. Kandel . Norton, New York, 2006. 526 pp. $29.95, C$42, £19.99. ISBN 0-393-05863-8. The Nobel Prize-winning author weaves together his memories and an accessible sketch of our current understanding of the biological basis of thought, learning, and memory.

In Search of Memory: The Emergence Of a New Science of Mind by Eric R.Kandel (2006) Norton, New York

In Search of Memory: The Emergence Of a New Science of Mind by Eric R.Kandel (2006) Norton, New York

In search of memory The emergence of a new science of mind

In search of memory The emergence of a new science of mind

Detection as Method: Reconstructing the Past in Godwin and Freud*

AbstractPsychoanalysis emerged as a distinct science toward the end of a century that witnessed important developments in two fields using investigative methods closely resembling its own: the historical sciences – especially the new sciences of antiquity and prehistory such as archeology, geology, and paleontology – and detective fiction. Psychoanalysts, historians, and detectives employ similar methods of induction and inference in their attempts to reconstruct causal sequences of past events and weave them into a coherent narrative form. However, the new science of mind differed from the emerging sciences of prehistory and the new genre of fictional forensics in its swift adoption of a transparent “literary” model of interpretation largely untroubled by the challenges to theorization posed by new material data, as opposed to linguistic or symbolic evidence. Two figures in particular can help us trace these interlocking developments in psychoanalysis, the historical sciences, and literary detection: Sigmund Freud and William Godwin. The former drew on the fields of archeology and detection to illustrate the methodology of his new science of mind, while the latter not only concerned himself with the practice and theory of history, but also, according to many scholars of the genre, all but invented modern detective fiction and the psychological thriller.

Computational Models of the Mind and Psychiatry

The psychological sciences have witnessed a paradigm shift with the emergence of cognitive science as the "new science of mind."