Rethinking Cognitive Psychology

Description

The humanist's plaintive cry, "I am not a machine," is in response to the mainstream cognitive science view that the human mind is similar to a computational machine-what scientists call a formal system. In a series of three books, Dr. Lynch challenges these mainstream theories by showing how human cognition consists of two parts: a part inherited from the nonhuman primates that is not based on language and a part that is based on human natural syntactic language. Natural language is therefore not just a means of communication, as asserted by most cognitive scientists, but is essential to what is often referred to as human thought or reason. Humans can, of course, think without using language but only in a way that is also shared by our chimp cousins. His first book, subtitled Thinking without Words, characterized that languageless mode of cognition. His second book in the series was subtitled Thinking with Words and focused on the role of natural language in human thought. The third book, subtitled Rethinking Cognitive Psychology, completes the trilogy on cognition and grounds the concepts developed in the first two books by analyzing specific details of the brain and mind. Book III of I Am Not a Machine addresses the brain's organization, neurochemical system, sensory perception and motor control systems, and human emotion. Many aspects of human cognition can be best understood as they unfold, and therefore Book III explores aspects of the human development. The second half of Book III deals with the developmental disorders of high functioning autism, Asperger's Syndrome, and Savant Syndrome. A cognitive analysis of these disorders provides a way of bridging the gap between low-level neural aspects of the brain with a high-level characterization of behavior.