Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [354]
At this point I interjected, “Excuse me, but I wanted to know what work you have been doing.”
“If you had said that, we had said that, poomer, near the fortunate, forpunate, tamppoo, all around the fourth of martz. Oh, I get all confused,” he replied, looking somewhat puzzled that the stream of language did not appear to satisfy me.66
In contrast, a person with damage to Broca’s area, though able to understand language, has great difficulty producing any; the speech is fragmented, lacking in grammatical structure, and deficient in modifiers of nouns and verbs.
This much is known at the macro level. Nothing, however, is known about how the neuronal networks within Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas carry out language functions in normal persons; those areas are still “black boxes” to psychologists—mechanisms whose input and output are known but whose internal machinery is a mystery.
But neuroscientists have found a few clues. Analyses of brain function in speech-impaired persons by means of electrode probes during surgery, PET and fMRI scanning, and other methods have shown that linguistic knowledge is located not only in Wernicke’s and Broca’s Areas but in many parts of the brain and is assembled when needed. Dr. Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa College of Medicine is one of many researchers who have concluded that information about any object is widely distributed. If the object is, say, a polystyrene cup (Damasio’s example), its shape will be stored in one place, crushability in another, texture in another, and so on. These connect, by neural networks, to a “convergence zone” and thence to a verbal area where the noun “cup” is stored.67 This is strikingly similar to the abstract portraits of the semantic memory network we saw earlier in this chapter.
In the past several years, PET and fMRI scans of normal people have identified areas in the brain that are active when specific linguistic processes are going on. But despite a wealth of such information, the data do not tell us how the firing of myriad neurons in those locations becomes a word, a thought, a sentence, or a concept in the mind of the individual. The data provide a more detailed model than was formerly available of where language processes take place in the brain, but cognitive neuroscience has not yet yielded a theory as to how the neural events become language. As Michael Gazanniga and his co-authors say in Cognitive Neuroscience, “The human language system is complex, and much remains to be learned about how the biology of the brain enables the rich speech and language comprehension that characterize our daily lives.”68*
“Much remains”? A memorable understatement.
Reasoning
Some years ago I asked Gordon Bower, a prominent memory researcher, a question about thinking and was taken aback by his testy reply: “I don’t work on ‘thinking’ at all. I don’t know what ‘thinking’ is.” How could the head of Stanford University’s psychology department not work on thinking at all—and not even know what it is? Then, rather grudgingly, Bower added, “I presume it’s the study of reasoning.”
Thinking was traditionally a central theme in psychology, but by the 1970s the proliferation of knowledge in cognitive psychology had made the term unhandy, since it included processes as disparate as momentary short-term memory and protracted problem solving. Psychologists preferred to speak of thought processes in more specific terms: “chunking,” “reasoning,” “retrieval,” “categorization,” “formal operations,” “problem solving,” and scores of others. “Thinking” came to have a narrower and more precise meaning than before: the manipulation of knowledge to achieve a goal. To avoid any misunderstanding, however, many psychologists preferred, like Bower, to use the term “reasoning.”
Although human beings have always viewed reasoning ability as the essence of their humanity, research on it was long a psychological backwater.69 From the 1930s to the 1950s little work was done on reasoning except for the problem-solving experiments of Karl Duncker and