The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a
paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional
information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer
metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream
approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental
activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to
move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with
it. The Continuity of 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 this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending
a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking
about the day's events involves the coalescing of different
neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous
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 comprises diverse mental
states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of 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. As a result, the apparent partitions
that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably
turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions.
The initial chapters provide first-hand 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 discuss what the mind itself must
look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents
are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential
reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to
see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.
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