Our Mental Life

On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g.

Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop – is repre...

Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.

The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller.

Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts fr...

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning.

The hydraulic metaphor persisted ...

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, ...

The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human b...

We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device.

We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused.

For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain wo...

A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s.

It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another.

We are, without doubt, built to make social connections. A h...

 It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight.

Perhaps most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effective...

 In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain.

By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature.

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.

Robert Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the A...

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intel...

Sometimes they also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph.

The rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside...