The Continuity of Mind

Description

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, but dynamical-systems accounts of mental activity are now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing them to more beyond merely brandishing trendy buzzwords. The Continuity of the Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. In The Continuity of the Mind Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the days events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your thoughts) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that is comprised of diverse mental states. Spivey has arranged The Continuity of the Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. The initial chapters provide empirical demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. Cover......Page 1 Halftitle......Page 2 Recent Titles in the Oxford Psychology Series......Page 3 Inside Cover......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 Foreword......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 12 Contents......Page 16 1 -- Toward a Continuity Psychology......Page 20 2 -- Some Conceptual Tools for Tracking Continuous Mental Trajectories......Page 47 3 -- Some Experimental Tools for Tracking Continuous Mental Trajectories......Page 68 4 -- Some Simulation Tools for Tracking Continuous Mental Trajectories......Page 97 5 -- Constructive Feedback for Modularity......Page 135 6 -- Temporal Dynamics in Categorization......Page 158 7 -- Temporal Dynamics in Language Comprehension......Page 186 8 -- Temporal Dynamics in Visual Perception......Page 224 9 -- Temporal Dynamics in Action......Page 254 10 -- Temporal Dynamics in Reasoning......Page 274 11 -- Uniting and Freeing the Mind......Page 303 12 -- Dynamical (Self-)Consciousness?......Page 324 Appendix: MATLAB Code for Several Normalized Recurrence Simulations......Page 352 Notes......Page 362 Bibliography......Page 372 Index......Page 438