"What it is like to be you?" The mind encompasses everything we experience. These experiences are created by the brain, and we are often unaware of the process of creation. Experience is personal and we cannot know what others are experiencing, but we also cannot know what is going on in our own brains.
What is mind? What is consciousness? What is the relationship between mind and consciousness and our brain? The following content is selected from "Mind: Prediction and Consciousness in the Brain", which has been abridged and modified from the original text. Published with permission from the publisher.
"Mind: Prediction and Consciousness of the Brain", [US] written by E. Bruce Goldstein, translated by Liu Linshu, Machinery Industry Press, August 2023 edition.
In the mid-19th century, Franciscus Donders, a professor of physiology at Utrecht University, made the first attempts to measure the mind in a laboratory setting. Donders wanted to know how long it takes for people to make a specific decision. To answer this question, he measured subjects' reaction times under two conditions.
Condition 1 is to measure the "simple reaction time": as long as the subject sees the flash displayed on the screen, he must press the button immediately. The "simple reaction time" is the time difference between the flash and the button pressing action. The second condition is to measure the "choice reaction time": now the flash may appear on the left or right side of the screen. If it appears on the left, the subject must press the left button; if it appears on the right, the subject must press the right button. . This includes the decision of "which key should I press?"
Donders found that the "choice reaction time" was about 0.1 seconds longer than the "simple reaction time". Based on this, he concluded that in the current experimental situation, the time it took for the subjects to make a decision was 0.1 seconds. Measuring a decision-making process that is invisible and intangible is already a bit bluffing, but the real importance of this experiment is the reasoning process of Donders.
The sequence of events between stimulus and behavioral response in Donders' experiment: (a) simple reaction time task, (b) choice reaction time task. The dotted line represents the reaction time measured by Donders, which is the time between the flash (event 1) and the key press (event 2). Note that Donders did not measure psychological reactions directly, but instead extrapolated them based on the measured reaction times. Illustrations from the inside of "Mind: Prediction and Consciousness in the Brain".
measures the interval between stimulus (flash) and behavioral response (key press) under simple condition (a) and selection condition (b) respectively, and does not directly measure psychological response (seeing flash, deciding which key to press). The subjects' reaction time under the choice condition was 0.1 second longer than that under the simple condition. Based on this, Dondes speculated that this 0.1 second was the extra "mental time" required for decision-making.
Looking more closely at Donders's method, in order to measure the time required to make a decision, he hypothesized that additional mental activity in the "choice task" involves judging which side the flash occurred and deciding which key to press. He did not actually witness the subjects making these decisions, but speculated that these invisible decisions caused the subjects' reactions to slow down.
Poster for the documentary "The Struggle of the Mind" (2014).
In the second half of the 19th century, there were also some studies that adopted Donders' paradigm. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus studied memory using meaningless strings of characters (such as iul, zrt, or fxp) and measured subjects' memory accuracy for these strings after different time intervals. He used the collected data to draw a "forgetting curve", revealing a specific pattern in which the number of strings in the subjects' memory decreased over time. Ebbinghaus's study was important because it was the first to graphically depict the specific characteristics of a specific mental function (memory).
At the end of the 19th century, the empirical research surrounding the mind seemed to be on the right track. However, at the dawn of dawn, a series of important events brought it to an abrupt end. One of them was Wilhelm Wundt's 1879 study of the mind. The University of Leipzig creates the first psychology laboratory.
Wundt made an indelible contribution to psychology's eventual separation from philosophy and becoming a truly independent empirical science. However, he advocated the use of introspection to study the specific components of the mind, which caused the study of the mind to fall into a trap at the beginning of the 20th century. Stagnation.Wundt's method was called "analytic introspection," in which participants were asked to describe their experiences.
For example, in one experiment, Wundt asked subjects to describe their experience when hearing a five-note chord played on a piano. He wanted to know whether the subjects could hear all the five tones that make up the chord. Although today, more than a hundred years later, this "self-report method" has been widely used in psychological experiments again, Wundt's research results at that time were "varied from person to person" to a considerable extent.
This fact annoyed John B. Watson, who in 1900 was a graduate student in the psychology department at the University of Chicago. Watson had always been dissatisfied with the fact that researchers at the time could not test the subjects' verbal reports. He believed that if psychology really wanted to become a serious empirical science, some changes must be made, so he had great ambitions. Enthusiasm began to transform psychology, trying to "sweep the study of the mind out of business."
Behaviorism and the stagnation of mind research
At the beginning of the 20th century, Watson founded behaviorism, which brought the research surrounding the mind to a standstill. Watson stated the main purpose of behaviorism in his article "Psychology in the Eyes of Behaviorists" published in 1913:
Psychology in the eyes of behaviorists is purely objective and belongs to a branch of empirical natural science. The theoretical goal of this discipline is to predict and control behavior. It does not use introspection as a basic research method, and the scientific value of relevant data does not depend on whether they can be described from the perspective of consciousness. …We are engaged in groundbreaking work: moving the research goals of psychology from consciousness to behavior.
Watson denies the methodological status of introspection in the article, arguing that the main research object of psychology should be observable behavior, rather than events occurring in the mind (that is, those unobservable processes, including thinking, emotion, and reasoning). Underscoring his opposition to traditional research on the mind, he further claimed that "psychology should no longer delude itself into thinking that it can treat mental states as objects of observation." In other words, Watson limited the research object of psychology to behavioral data and opposed the practice of "going beyond" these data to perform inferences and draw conclusions about unobservable psychological events. Watson is best known for his "Little Albert Experiment," in which Watson and Rosalie Rayner used Ivan Pavlov's classical conditions Functional paradigm.
In a series of experiments in the 1890s, Pavlov linked food to the sound of a bell, training dogs to salivate whenever they heard the sound of a bell. Watson connected a loud noise with a little rabbit, causing little Albert, who originally loved rabbits, to eventually become afraid of rabbits.
According to Watson, conditioning is sufficient to explain much human behavior without inferring what is going on in the mind. Behaviorism soon became popular in American psychology. Psychologists originally asked: "What can behavior tell us about the mind?"
Under the influence of behaviorism, they began to care about "about behavior, humans and animals." What can patterns of responses to stimuli tell us?” Later, B.F. Skinner devised a set of behavioral measures called operant conditioning. Mice and pigeons were trained to press levers to receive food rewards.
Still from the movie "Gaslight" (1944).
Skinner used this method to show the connection between the "reinforcement program" (how often and in what pattern a food reward is delivered when the animal presses a lever) and the behavior of the animal pressing the lever.
For example, if a mouse is rewarded every time it presses a lever, the frequency and pattern of its lever presses will be significantly different than if it receives a reward once every five lever presses.
Skinner's system is aesthetically pleasing - it is objective and therefore unmistakably "scientific". Operant conditioning is widely used in practice. For example, "behavioral therapy" corrects patients' inappropriate behaviors by controlling the reward principle.But some changes began to occur in the mid-20th century, and the world of psychology and popular culture was about to witness a renaissance in the study of the mind.
A paradigm shift toward the study of the mind
In the 1950s, behaviorism still dominated psychology, but there were signs that a paradigm shift was brewing. The so-called paradigm refers to a system composed of relevant concepts and experimental procedures in scientific research work in a specific period. Paradigm shift refers to the change from one mainstream paradigm to another.
In the field of scientific research, an example of a paradigm shift is from classical physics in the early 20th century (based on the work of Isaac Newton and other scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries) to modern physics (based on Einstein's theory of relativity, and a number of scholars the development of quantum theory).
Similarly, the development from behaviorism, which focused only on observable behavior, to cognitive psychology constituted a paradigm shift in psychology in the 1950s. This was a huge step in the history of psychology: people began to use observable behavior to infer the specific workings of the mind.
An important event that promoted the above-mentioned paradigm shift was the launch of a computer for mass users by IBM in 1954. These early computers were gargantuan compared to today's laptops, but they quickly found their way into university labs, where they were used to analyze data and, more importantly, inspired a new understanding of the mind. opinion.
One of the reasons why computers have attracted the attention of psychologists is that they process information in a step-by-step manner. We can see that the "input processor" receives the information and transfers it to the "memory unit" for further processing by the "operation unit" to generate the computer's output.
Some psychologists got inspiration from this step-by-step information processing model and designed an information processing paradigm for mental research. According to this paradigm, the workings of the mind can be described as a sequence of information-processing steps.
Figure b (see below) depicts an example of the early steps in the workings of the mind, proposed by the British psychologist Donald Broadbent in 1958. What inspired him was a series of experiments designed to test whether people could extract the relevant message from many messages presented at the same time: this kind of thing is very common, when you are chatting with friends at a party, you have actually Ignore the conversations of others around you.
(a) Simplified computer operation flow chart, (b) Broadbent's mental flow chart. Illustrations from the inside of "Mind: Prediction and Consciousness in the Brain".
Colin Cherry studied this phenomenon under experimental conditions. He asked subjects to wear headphones, play different audio materials in their left and right ears respectively, and asked them to focus on one of the messages (focus ) and try to ignore the other paragraph (non-concern).
For example, subjects were asked to focus on what they heard in their left ear - "Sam is looking forward to the holidays and being reunited with his family..." and ignore what they heard in their right ear - "Some people believe that it is the mind that makes us who we are..." .
When the subjects focused on the focus, they could clearly hear the relevant information. At the same time, they would say that someone was speaking in the other earphone, but they could not hear the content. Figure b depicts Broadbent's interpretation of this phenomenon. The "input" at this point is a lot of messages, like a chattering conversation at a party.
These messages will enter the "filter", which will filter out what other people say except friends: only the words of friends can enter the "detector" and pass the corresponding content to you. Broadbent's flowchart provides a way to analyze the workings of the mind as a step-by-step process of information processing, from which hypotheses can be developed for subsequent experimental testing.
1956 has been hailed as the "first year of cognitive science"
At that time, Chuck and Broadbent were not the only ones who were obsessed with designing new methods for mind research. John McCarthy, a young professor at Dartmouth College, ) also has some ideas.
McCarthy thought, would it be possible to write a program to simulate the operation of the human mind? To this end, McCarthy convened a conference at Dartmouth College in 1956 to explore how to program computers so that they can produce intelligent behavior.The name of this conference - "Artificial Intelligence Summer Research Project" marks the first time that the term "artificial intelligence" has appeared on the historical stage. McCarthy defined artificial intelligence research as “enabling a machine to behave ‘intelligently’ in a human-like manner.”
Stills from the documentary "Mysterious You" (2019).
The conference attracted a large number of experts with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including but not limited to psychology, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and information theory. Near the end of the ten-week conference, two attendees—Herb Simon and Alan Newell of the Carnegie Institute of Technology—demonstrated a computer program that They call them "logic theorists."
This is a revolutionary program that generates logical proofs of mathematical theorems on its own. Although the "Logic Theorist" is still very primitive compared to today's artificial intelligence programs, it is indeed a true "thinking machine" because it can use reasoning to solve problems like a human, rather than simply crunching numbers. .
Shortly after the Dartmouth conference, the "MIT Information Theory Symposium" was held in September of the same year. This was another meeting that will go down in history. Newell and Simon once again presented "Logic Theorists" at the meeting, and attendees also listened to Harvard psychologist George Miller's paper report "The Magic Number 7: Adding and Subtracting 2."
In this paper, Miller put forward a point: There is a limit to our information processing ability-the limit of the human brain is about 7 information units, which is almost the length of a telephone number (not including the area code).
The series of events reviewed above—Chuck's experiments, Broadbent's "filter" model, and two important conferences in 1956—marked a paradigm shift in psychology, the so-called "cognitive revolution" "The beginning of. But it is worth mentioning that the move from behaviorism to cognitivism (although indeed revolutionary) actually took some time. The scientists who attended the two conferences in 1956 did not know that people would still mention these two conferences many years later - in the history of science, 1956 has been hailed as the "first year of cognitive science".
Ironically, the publication of B.F. Skinner's book "Verbal Behavior" in 1957 became another landmark event in the return of the mind to the scientific stage. Skinner pointed out in the book that children acquire language through operant conditioning. According to this view, children imitate what they hear in the correct way because there are rewards for doing so. Stills from
documentary "Mysterious You" (2019).
But in 1959, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky relentlessly refuted Skinner's views in a review. Chomsky points out that many sentences uttered by children are not actually rewarded ("I hate you, Mom!" - for example), and that normal language development includes a stage in which children utter Some grammatically inaccurate sentences, such as "the boy hit the ball", certainly cannot be because they have been reinforced.
Chomsky believes that what determines language development is not imitation or reinforcement, but an innate biological program that does not vary across cultures. Chomsky's view that language is a product of mental architecture, rather than the result of reinforcement, led psychologists to reexamine the claim that language and other complex behaviors, such as problem solving and reasoning, are attributable to operant conditioning. Many people are beginning to realize that to understand complex cognitive phenomena, we must not only measure observable behavior, but also consider the behind-the-scenes mental operating patterns revealed by this behavior.
As more and more psychologists began to rekindle their enthusiasm for the study of the mind, Ulrich Neisser published the first "Cognitive Psychology" textbook in 1967, studying the mind. Psychologists also began calling themselves "cognitive psychologists."They drew more and more flowcharts around the information processing processes of memory, language, and problem solving, making the information processing paradigm aimed at revealing the internal mechanisms of the mind deeply rooted in people's minds, and behaviorism gradually faded out of people's sight.
original author/[American] e. Bruce Goldstein
excerpt/He Ye
editor/Shang Chongming
proofreader/Liu Jun
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