Larry Barsalou is a cognitive psychologist. To
put it simply, he thinks about thinking. He designs experiments
he hopes will help demonstrate and explain how the human mind works.
Knowledge is a big deal to Barsalou. He thinks about it all the
time.
“Brains don’t work like cameras. They have an attentional
system that focuses on components of experience,” said Barsalou,
whose lightning-quick speech and energetic delivery show he wears
his passion for his work on his sleeve. “The brain doesn’t
just record an image of an entire scene, instead it captures information
about a scene's components such as a chair, a face, an eye, conversation,
movement. If you are talking about a chair, it can focus on the
overall shape, color or size. The brain is very flexible.”
In spring 2002, Barsalou, Winship Distinguished Research Professor
of Psychology, earned a prestigious fellowship from the Guggenheim
Foundation—one of just 184 people selected. He took a year’s
sabbatical from teaching to work on The Human Conceptual System,
a book that explores the history, different approaches, misconceptions
and applications of the theories of human knowledge in conceptual
systems.
Through a review of previously published research—a good deal
of it his own—Barsalou’s book will discuss his theories
on the subject, many of them originating outside the mainstream.
What Barsalou discusses so passionately are theories that even one
of his own colleagues dismissed as crank and professional suicide
10 years ago. Now, though, many psychologists have begun to embrace
them, along with scholars and professionals in other disciplines
such as philosophy, literature and even business.
Since the 1950s, the majority of cognitive psychologists have held
the view that the brain is similar to a computer—it accesses
symbolic knowledge in different parts of the brain as if opening
a file.
Dramatic advances in neuroscience over the past 20 years have helped
drive Barsalou’s theories that knowledge and thinking involve
sensory-motor mechanisms in the brain that simulate the experience
one is thinking about—like watching a movie in the mind (although
not necessarily consciously).
“If I am thinking about an elephant that’s not present,
I’m running my visual system as if I were looking at one,”
Barsalou said. “I’ve seen elephants, and my memory system
has stored away the state that my visual system was in, and now
if I’m thinking of one—the way that this theory goes—I
simulate it. I re-enact my visual system partially, not exactly,
as if an elephant were present. So I’m not hallucinating an
elephant, but I’m getting a vague image of an elephant.”
Try it. Think about an elephant. What is the context? Is the elephant
in a zoo? In a circus? Is it on television or a picture in a book?
What is it doing? It is moving? What is the angle at which you see
it?
The mind is re-creating the experience of seeing an elephant. The
creature isn’t there, but the mind is pretending it is.
The elephant experiment is a nice party trick, but Barsalou has
many formal avenues to support his theories as well. Through laboratory
experiments, Barsalou and other researchers have provided empirical
evidence for the view that sensory-motor systems represent knowledge
through reenactments. For instance, one Barsalou experiment showed
that subjects were able to process sensory properties of an object
(if a person was thinking about "perfumed" for soap, she
could quickly process "musty" for old books) faster than
if she had to switch modalities (like "noisy" for television).
In other words, the brain had to switch gears, and that took just
a few milliseconds more time. Knowledge relied on a sensory-motor
function, just as he and his new school of cognitive psychologists
have postulated.
Knowledge, of course, relies heavily on learning. And the experiences
Barsalou investigates are largely subconscious—but nevertheless
they unquestionably exist, as indicated through scientific experiments.
“One characteristic of expertise behavior is how automatic
it is, like driving,” Barsalou said. “While you’re
driving, you are listening to the radio or talking to someone; you
don’t have a clue of what you’ve seen or done going
down the road, but you’ve done it just fine.” The same
is true of processing knowledge in most daily routines. “What
you’ve done is mapped conditions in the world to the right
responses so many times that when those conditions appear an unconscious
part of your brain recognizes it and generates the right action.”
Barsalou is an intense, highly driven guy (instead of working 70–80
hours a week like he did when he was younger, Barsalou now works
between 50–60 and he might take a vacation every year). Although
he didn’t teach last year, Barsalou still was involved in
roughly 40 collaborative projects, many of them involving experiments
in his lab, and he spent a great deal of time writing. About one-third
of his book is finished, and all of the primary research is complete.
He just needs to pull together the narrative. Taking it easy doesn’t
come easy for him, but Barsalou does find time to relax through
meditation.
Barsalou has dabbled in meditation since he first began studying
Buddhist teachings while growing up in the 1960s. “It’s
a lot like developing a physical skill like playing tennis or the
guitar,” Barsalou said. “Meditation is a particular
state you have to train your mind to get into, where you are watching
it rather than running along with it.”
Barsalou added that his meditative experiences as a young man helped
drive his interest in cognitive psychology. “What I really
liked about cognitive psychology is that it is not just a casual,
subjective way of finding out how the mind works. You actually can
design rigorous scientific experiments to verify what the mind is
doing.”
Even when the subject is relaxation, for Barsalou, work is never
too far away.
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