In a few short weeks I will be be transplanting my life from my home of the past 18 years to a new home. My new adventure will be in Charleston, where I will be attending a graduate program in biomedical science. My special focus will be in neuroscience. My friends reading this might want to know exactly what it is I will be doing.
The actual curriculum in my classes will be largely in biochemistry, pathology (study of disease), genetics, and cellular biology. There will also be courses concerning scientific methods for research, statistical analysis, and ethical guidelines (because you know, I'll definitely use my knowledge to take over the world).
The lab work will be in neuroscience more specifically. The lab focuses largely on developmental neuroscience, studying how mental processes differ across the life span and the neural differences responsible. The lab also focuses on individual differences within an age group, thus incorporating personality psychology. It's a very interdisciplinary lab, which is well suited for my interests. What exactly are my interests within neuroscience, then?
I have a wide variety of interests within the field because I want my own theorizing to be consistent with all known facts. Much of debate in modern cognitive science centers around visual perception and language acquisition and comprehension and the explanatory toolkit uses the language of internal mental representations and computer science. The mind and brain are generally conceived to be computers of a variety, with our visual perceptions being representational reconstructions manufactured from sense data. However, I adopt a different view. I adopt the view of direct perception, particularly as formulated by James J. Gibson in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Gibson argued that we are in direct contact with the world in our senses, that there is no need to invoke mental representations. What we perceive are invariant features of the world that afford actions. These invariants are the constant features of the environment. Many defenders of the indirect, representational view argue that reality is not as we sense it because there are so many wavelengths of light not visible to the human eye. The Gibsonian answer to this is that this is irrelevant. This information is not available and is excluded from our sensory experience, but what we perceive are the invariants. What colors are available to the senses is not a concern.
However, I think there is far too much emphasis on visual perception. The issue of mental representation doesn't arise when you consider the other senses, such as touch, smell, hearing, and tasting. It would be silly to argue that the taste of a good soda represents the liquid, or that the sensation of a cat rubbing against you is a representation of a cat. Given the Gibsonian view, I think it is possible to treat visual perception in a non-representational way as well.
The other obsession of cognitive science has been around language. Most have a computational view of language in linguistics and cognitive psychology. Generally, there is a mental lexicon filled with representations of words stored in the brain. However, there is mounting evidence that language use does not consist of the recall of specific entries in a mental lexicon being arranged in the proper order by a mental grammar. Language appears to utilize other neural circuits to simulate the meaning. For instance, when someone speaks about hitting a baseball, your brain's areas for motor function have an increase of activity. Language is said to be embodied, that is, largely utilizing areas not specialized for language but for action.
I also mentioned that the lab I am going to work in utilizes personality psychology. This was my specialty in my undergraduate psychology program. Modern personality psychology is built around trait theory. Trait theory posits that there are multiple dimensions that people differ in long term patterns of behavior, emotion, and cognition. These dimensions are called traits. These traits are not specific neural circuits, brain areas, or mental processes. Rather, these are emergent patterns that result from differences in individual brains brought about by differences in genetics and life experience. Traits cannot be observed in a moment, but only in time. This brings me to my next point.
Most theorizing in psychology and neuroscience is generally non-temporal. It doesn't consider time an important factor. Order matters, but not the time it takes for a given process to occur. I also think that to understand mental processes in the brain we have to take into consideration how patterns of activity fold out over time. Just as we may not observe personality in a short moment, a mental process cannot be understood by looking at static pictures like those produced by fMRI.
In summary, my view of the brain is ecological. Perception is of invariants in the environment that afford action. My view of language is centered around embodiment. Language is based not on a specialized language area, nor is it computational in nature, but re-appropriates the brain areas used for action. I also believe that cognition is dynamical. Time is often essential to understanding how the brain performs a mental function. Moreover there are properties such as traits that are not "molecular" in nature but are "molar", that is, extended in time and space because they are emergent properties of individual differences in brains. I believe these facts are essential to properly guide research even in the biomedical sciences. Traits, for example, are sometimes associated with differential responses to medications. The same differences that cause traits to exist also affect how the brain responds to various psychoactive medications. I believe personality evaluations then can be used as a measure to better prescribe medications in a clinical setting. By embracing an ecological, embodied, dynamical, non-reductive view of the mind and brain, we can achieve a scientifically rich understanding without recourse to either ruthless reductionism, computationalism, or outdated Cartesian dualism.
The fact that I will be taking classes heavily oriented on the biochemical and cellular levels of understanding while working in a lab focusing on the neural network and brain region level of analysis will give me the rich variety of information I will need to adequately think about the big issues in neuroscience; issues ranging from why some particular chemical or cellular abnormality results in mental or neurological illness to the nature of consciousness itself.
For those who choose to follow this blog, you will find occasional posts on everything ranging from mental and neurological disease, philosophical discussions of how we should understand the mind, interesting experiments I read about, or perhaps from time to time, my thoughts on other fields of science I read something interesting about.
