Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [369]
FIGURE 45
Levels of reality: molecules, letters, words, impossible objects
The design is made up of molecules of ink on paper, a reality that has nothing to do with its meaning. At a higher level of organization, the molecules make up letters, which individually are symbols without meaning but as here organized make up the word “cognition.” But we are not done. The design, though it looks real and three-dimensional, is an object that cannot exist in the real world; the paradoxical illusion is a mental epiphenomenon. Explain that, if you can, in terms of molecules of ink, letters, or bursts of energy in the neurons of the visual cortex.
Whether or not there is ever a full and satisfying explanation of mental events in neural terms, the revolutions of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience have been successful side by side, overlapping, and in concert with each other.
As for the title of this section, “And the Winner Is—,” we now seem to be at the top of the tenth (or eleventh? or twelfth?)—and still tied.
* A bit, in information theory, is the smallest unit of information: it is equal to a simple yes or no. A digit or a letter of the alphabet is equal to several bits.
* The comment, made in 2002, still holds true.
* Lacking the toy, you can play the game with three or more coins of different sizes. Draw three squares on a sheet of paper, pile the coins in one of them, decide which square the pile is to end up in, and start. The three-coin game is easy, the four-coin game not so easy, and the five-coin game quite hard.
* The answer: PROBLEMS
* The only correct deduction is that some of the chess players are not archaeologists.
* Storage of information in the brain has long been thought to be the result of some kind of unexplained strengthening of the synapses involved in any learning experience. Recent neurophysiological research, too arcane to be fully spelled out here, has established that in any form of learning, a series of at least 15 steps involving 100 or more different molecules takes place, switching on certain genes. These make the post-synaptic neuron more easily activated by the presynaptic neuron’s release of various neurotransmitters (Marcus, 2004:100). In addition, the process induces the growth of additional synaptic connections on the presynaptic side (Kandel, 2006, chaps. 14, 17, 19). These changes, in effect, record information, although any elementary item in memory—a shape, say, or a sound—may require that a vast number of strengthened synapses, linked in a network, fire together.
† The solution continues as follows:
S must be either 8 or 9, depending on whether or not there is a carry. Substituting 1 for M, where S + 1 = O, we see that O can be only 0 or 1. But M is 1, so O must be 0; therefore S must be 9 and there is no carry.
In the second column from the left, E + 0 would be E unless there is a carry; hence there must be a carry. So E + 1 = N.
If E is odd, N is even, and vice versa. If E is odd, it can only be 3, 5, or 7 (1 and 9 are already assigned). Try 3. And so on.
SEVENTEEN
The
Psychotherapists
Growth Industry
Let us indulge in a bit of fantasy. Wilhelm Wundt, invisible except to us, returns from Somewhere to see what has become of the science he launched more than a century ago.
Stern and formal in his black lecture gown, the shade of the Herr Professor stares uncomprehendingly as some of his intellectual descendants, at a cognitive science conference, discuss the molecular basis of memory in the giant sea snail, while others speak of a computer program that simulates parallel distributing processing. Elsewhere, however, he permits himself an uncharacteristic beaming smile when he hears that six decades ago there were only about 4,000 psychologists in America but today there are some 180,000, (about half at the doctorate level, half at the master’s level), a nearly forty-five-fold growth.1
When, however, the vaporous Dr. Wundt drifts into the offices of the American