Britt Anderson

I have had many professional labels. I am not sure which one, if any, apply to this blog. My professional career began in academic neurology. During that phase I saw patients, wrote on neglect, but as I was also interested in general intelligence I did experiments running rats in mazes, and counting neurons and measuring dendrites via Golgi stains. That technical competence led to similar projects with human brains including Einstein’s. There were also some small mathematical and simulation projects at that time, but those really began in earnest after I left medicine to earn a PhD at Brown in Brain Sciences (the program exists, but I don’t think they grant degrees in that anymore). During that phase I also gained experience with awake behaving primate experiments and multiple simultaneous neuronal recordings: both performing and analyzing. This was followed by my time as a more or less conventional cognitive neuroscientist. I conducted experiments with a wide arrange of participants: young people, old people, brain damaged people, and with a wide range of techniques: fMRI, EEG, eye tracking, and computational modeling. As a result I feel I am in a good position to evaluate what has been called the theory crisis in psychology. One part of me feels pessimistic: so much research seems to be more useful for professional enhancement than advancing scientific understanding; but the optimistic side of me sees this as a reasonable response to human curiosity operating in the absence of clear, pragmatic guidance on how to do better. What I want to explore here is how we could do better. How could all our thinking about the mind be more effectively funneled into clear, testable theories? I think Psychology and Cognitive Science need a new language for the expression of ideas, and I want to share here my thoughts on what that could be. It will be anchored into math and programming, and that will be hard for many since the necessary mathematical and computational education is not a part of our current curriculum. If you are a cognitive (neuro)scientist with an academic position you will have little time or opportunity to backfill your educational gaps, and a great deal of negative reinforcement awaits if you try. But if senior people recognize the need they can build the programs to educate the next generation if they had an idea on what that education should consist of. And the younger generation, feeling the ennui of their seniors, and perhaps recognizing already the impotency of the last few decades of increasingly technical, but explanatorily empty, research may have an appetite for a new direction, and the professional horizon to reap the rewards of their current investment.

So, about me? I am a broadly experienced neurologist, neuroscientist, and cognitive scientist who feels he has seen the mountain. And if it is too late for me to reach the summit, I can still tell others about it and help them in the early stages of their ascent.