Thinking Like a Machine

In
the 1960’s John C. Lilly pioneered
the concept of the human brain as an organic computer, executing set
behavioral progrrams when presented
with certain situations. In his seminal paper, "Programming
and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer", he asserted that an individual
can gain control of the "meta-programs" which determine which behavioral
routines are called up in distinct situations.

Now researchers at Cornel University are claiming to
have gone beyond the cybernetic model in which comprehension takes place
in steps or stages, and have determined that "Instead, the mind should
be thought of more as
working
the way
biological
organisms
do: as a dynamic continuum, cascading through shades of grey."

In a new study published online this week in Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences (June 27-July 1), Michael Spivey,
a psycholinguist and associate professor of psychology at Cornell, tracked
the mouse movements of undergraduate students while working at a computer.
The findings provide compelling evidence that language comprehension
is a continuous process.

"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes
as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in
a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or
in a string of individuated binary symbols — like a digital computer," said
Spivey. "More recently, however, a growing number of studies,
such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In
this model,
perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous
trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation
patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized,
emergent properties — like a biological organism."

How does this relate to Continuous
Partial Attention?

From Cornell
University News Services