Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [339]
To be sure, the finding is an inference from results, not a direct observation of the process. But contrary to behaviorist dogma, inference of an unseen process from results is considered legitimate in the “hard” sciences. Geologists infer the events of the past from sediment layers, cosmologists the formation and development of the universe from the ancient light of distant galaxies, physicists the characteristics of short-lived atomic particles from tracks they leave in a cloud chamber or emulsion, and biologists the evolutionary path that led to Homo sapiens from fossils. So, too, with the interior universe of the mind: psychologists cannot voyage into it, but they can deduce how it works from the track, so to speak, made by an invisible thought process.
Revolution No. 2
What, another revolution so soon?
Well, not on the heels of the cognitive revolution, but not far behind it. This one, though long gathering force, would not burst forth until the 1980s, but we must look ahead to its emergence because much of what we will see happening in cognitive psychology will be affected by it. It was the cognitive neuroscience revolution.
That’s a relatively new name for an old school of thought about the mind, the biological approach to mental processes that sought to explain them in terms of neuronal processes and events. We saw a notable example of it in Hubel and Wiesel’s discoveries of retinal cells that respond only to specific shapes or directions of motion. That was recent, but the neuroscientific approach has antecedents going back at least to Descartes. Although he believed in the immateriality of mind, he conjectured, as we saw, that reflexes were caused by the flow of “animal spirits” through the nervous system, much as the movements of automata in the royal gardens were caused by the flow of water in pipes, and that memory was the result of the widening of the particular “pores of the brain” through which animal spirits had passed during learning.12 Similarly, a century ago the young Freud confidently asserted that all psychological processes could be understood as “quantitatively determined states” of the neurons, though he soon admitted with chagrin that the time was not ripe for such understanding.
The same hope, though, had continued to inspire many researchers. And during the past sixty years, and especially the past twenty-five, extraordinary advances in cognitive neuroscience have led some enthusiasts to assert that it will soon replace the psychological approach to the mind and that concepts such as needs, emotions, and thoughts will be replaced by physiological data. When such data are available, Paul Churchland, a philosopher of neuroscience, asserted in 1984,
we will set about reconceiving our internal states and activities, within a truly adequate framework at last. Our explanations of one another’s behavior will appeal to such things as our neuropharmacological states, the neural activity in specialized anatomical areas, and whatever other states are deemed relevant by the new theory.13
Most research in behavioral neuroscience in the decades immediately preceding its 1980s breakout as cognitive neuroscience was focused not on thought processes but on the physical events