A school counsellor in our neighbourhood recently helped a young kindergarten pupil overcome his fear of coming to school by explaining how a small part of our brain called the amygdala—represented by a finger puppet—sometimes makes us feel all kinds of emotions. The counsellor then took out a large mitten and covered the finger puppet, explaining how our cortex—the large top part of the brain—can learn to control the amygdala and regulate our emotions. This is just one of many examples of how the cognitive sciences are being used in everyday life.
Many primary and secondary school curricula now include principles and practices rooted in neuroscience and psychology, like fostering a growth mindset or understanding metacognition (Beach et al., 2020; Fraser, 2017). Even business schools are increasingly using neuroscience to frame their teaching on a wide range of topics from leadership to organisational and consumer behaviour (Murray, 2018). Cognitive sciences are now ubiquitously used to improve aviation safety and form a key part of airline pilot training (Perkins, 2021), while business leaders are increasingly tapping into this knowledge to understand their businesses and customers better (Furr et al., 2019). Cognitive sciences are all around us and have a broad impact on every conceivable discipline. They have also laid the foundation for artificial intelligence and robotics. We are living within the results of the cognitive revolution. And it did take a revolution to get us here: Cognition was long seen as uninteresting and unscientific.
Behaviourism is the systematic and scientific study of the behaviour of individual organisms (Graham, 2023). It came at least in part as a response to Freud’s psychoanalysis that lacked scientific rigour (Puligandla, 1967)—although that relationship is complex and many behaviourists like John Watson both popularised and tested many Freudian concepts in the lab (Rilling, 2000). As the name implies, the key focus of behaviourism is on behaviour, which can be described and measured. Behaviourists wanted to bring psychology (back) onto a firm scientific footing: They saw mental processes as entirely subjective and only objectively observable behaviour as a valid investigative approach (Moore, 1999). Psychology was no longer what William James described as the science of mental life but became the science of behaviour (Pinker, 2011). Cracks in this view soon started to appear. The linguist Noam Chomsky famously remarked that defining psychology solely as the science of behaviour is akin to defining physics as the science of meter reading (Miller, 2003).
Researchers in a wide range of different fields started finding empirical evidence for specific cognitive functions: Noam Chomsky described how children have an internalised sense of grammar and can apply it to an infinite number of novel sentences rather than just regurgitating taught responses (Pinker, 2011). George Miller (1956) found that people can only retain around seven (plus or minus two) pieces of information at any time. These examples show that we can objectively deduce knowledge about cognition without having to rely on introspection or non-scientific methods. Around the same time, massive strides were made in the areas of computer science and artificial intelligence, including on goal-driven systems (Boden, 2018). Similar advances in neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, mathematics, and logic advanced the studies of information processing, computational theories, and memory (Greenwood, 2015; Miller, 2003). The veil covered by behaviour was slowly pulled back and in 1960 the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies was founded (Pinker, 2011)—a landmark point that pointed to the future direction of interdisciplinary studies in the cognitive sciences (a term that was coined by Christopher Longuet-Higgins in 1973). Cognitivism was well and truly born.
Another development fuelled this revolution: Glimpses into the living brain. Electroencephalography (EEG) uses electrodes on the scalp to measure underlying brain activity. Although it was first used in the 1920s by the German neurologist Hans Berger, its initial applications are highly questionable and controversial as it was primarily used in the areas of psychiatry and criminology to find a physiological explanation for immoral and delinquent behaviour (Shirmann, 2014). It took decades for this tool to give insightful new understandings into our brain, mind, and cognition. But there were two other technological innovations that drove the cognitive revolution forward. A new technique injected lightly radioactive tracers into the bloodstream of patients. These tracers accumulated in areas of the brain that were most active and therefore needed the highest blood supply (Berger, 2003). The tracers could then be used to generate images of active areas, a procedure called positron emission tomography (PET). For the first time, brain activity in living organisms could be directly observed. This technique was developed from the 1960s through the 1970s. Around the same time, the first magnetic resonance images (MRI) were created (Lauterbur, 1973). But it took another two decades before this method was expanded to contrast different levels of blood oxygen, which led to the creation of functional MRI (or fMRI): Brain activity could now be imaged without injecting anything (Glover, 2011). These advances in neuroimaging techniques fuelled research in the cognitive sciences (Dolan, 2008).
The cognitive revolution can describe two things: On the one hand, it is a historical development starting in the 1950s that changed psychology and many related fields to shift the focus from behaviour towards cognition (behaviour is still studied extensively but not at the exclusion of cognition; Greenwood, 2015). On the other hand, it describes the explosive growth in research and understanding in the cognitive sciences over the last half-century (Gamez, 2012; Mandler, 2002). Regardless of how it is framed, what is clear is its lasting impact on a myriad of other disciplines and in our daily lives. Understanding how our mind works helps us understand ourselves better, as well as the people around us, and everything that involves minds—from businesses, to aviation safety, and positive school outcomes. In that sense, we are still living in the age of the cognitive revolution—and this age is unlikely to pass any time soon.
References
Beach, P. T., Anderson, R. C., Jacovidis, J. N., & Chadwick, K. L. (2020). Making the abstract explicit: The role of metacognition in teaching and learning. Inflexion. https://ibo.org/globalassets/new-structure/research/pdfs/metacognition-policy-paper.pdf
Berger, A. (2003). Positron emission tomography. British Medical Journal, 326(7404), 1449. https://doi.org/10.1136%2Fbmj.326.7404.1449
Boden, M. A. (2018). Artificial intelligence: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
Dolan, R. J. (2008). Neuroimaging of cognition: Past, present, and future. Neuron, 60(3), 496-502. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.038
Fraser, D. M. (2017). An exploration of the application and implementation of growth mindset principles within a primary school. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(4), 645-658. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12208
Furr, N., Nel, K., & Ramsøy, T. Z. (2019, Jan 07). Neuroscience is going to change how businesses understand their customers. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/02/neuroscience-is-going-to-change-how-businesses-understand-their-customers
Gamez, D. (2012). From Baconian to Popperian neuroscience. Neural Systems & Circuits, 2(2), 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1186/2042-1001-2-2
Glover, G. H. (2011). Overview of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neurosurgery Clinics of North America, 22(2), 133-139. https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.nec.2010.11.001
Graham, G. (2023). Behaviorism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
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Lauerbur, P. C. (1973). Image formation by induced local interactions: Examples employing nuclear magnetic resonance. Nature, 242, 190-191. https://doi.org/10.1038/242190a0
Longuet-Higgins, H. C. (1973). Comments on the Lighthill report and the Sutherland reply. Artificial Intelligence: A paper symposium. Science Research Council. pp. 35–37.
Mandler, G. (2002). Origins of the cognitive (r)evolution. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 38(4), 339-353. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.10066
Miller, G. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81-97. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/h0043158
Miller, G. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(3), 141-144. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(03)00029-9
Moore, J. (1999). The basic principles of behaviorism. In B. A. Thyer (Ed.) The philosophical legacy of behaviorism (pp. 41-68). Springer Dordrecht.
Murray, S. (2018, Feb 27). How brain science found its way into business school. Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/623f049a-1269-11e8-a765-993b2440bd73
Perkins, K. (2021). The new era of aviation safety: Cognitive science. AIN. https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/business-aviation/2021-07-01/new-era-aviation-safety-cognitive-science
Pinker, S. (2011). The cognitive revolution. The Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/10/the-cognitive-revolution/
Puligandla, R. (1967). Psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and psychotherapy. Journal of Thought, 2(3), 6-16.
Rilling, M. (2000). John Watson’s paradoxical struggle to explain Freud. American Psychologist, 55(3), 301-312. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0003-066X.55.3.301
Shirmann, F. (2014). “The wondrous eye of a new technology”—a history of the early electroencephalography (EEG) of psychopathy, delinquency, and immorality. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 232. https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffnhum.2014.00232
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