Lawrence Barsalou has been studying how people think about chairs.

In the process, the Emory cognitive psychologist has joined the growing number of researchers who are using neuroscience to pioneer a new understanding of the mind. Although the use of standard behavioral measures for the last fifty years has revolutionized our understanding of how the mind works, new techniques in neuroscience, such as functional magnetic imaging, are adding converging evidence and producing major new insights.

When Barsalou first began his research in the mid-1970s, he shared the view of most psychologists who theorized that the mind accessed knowledge in much the same way as a computer. In other words, when a person thought of a chair, the mind accessed information on chairs from a stored data structure similar to those used in computer programs. Not surprisingly, this cognitive theory sprang up during the 1950s when computers were first coming to the forefront. According to these views, thinking about a chair involves manipulating symbols in a data structure that stands for their properties.

Over the last decade, Barsalou and other researchers have begun peering inside people's heads to get a better picture of how the brain works. Augmenting standard behavioral methods with the help of neuroscience methods, they have new ideas about what is happening to the neurons in the brain when a person looks at a chair. They believe, for instance, that neurons located in the visual and motor systems are turned on and driven into a certain level of activation, which creates the experience of seeing a chair.

Both visual and motor systems run constantly to help people cope with the environment. So do hearing, taste and touch systems - neuroscience research has revealed the inner workings of these as well. Barsalou's laboratory work backs up the theory that the basis of knowledge stems from a person's re-running those systems as if actually involved in seeing, touching, hearing or tasting.

So when a person thinks about a chair in its absence, the brain runs the visual system in a way that resembles how the system would be running if the person were looking at a chair, and the brain's motor system runs as if the person were sitting down in a chair.

Instead of knowledge relying on symbolic data structures manipulated within a computer-like brain, the mind actually recreates states of seeing, touching, etc. when engaged in knowledge, perception, memory, language and thought.

"It's the most basic conceptual system," Barsalou says of this image-based theory. "You can imagine a simple organism having it, and seeing it evolve continuously into the human conceptual system."

In April 2002, Barsalou was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation on the basis of his past achievement and his exceptional promise. He was one of only 184 selected from an elite applicant pool of 2,800 scholars, artists and scientists. During his fellowship, he wrote extensively and published numerous articles in a wide variety of journals. In the future, Barsalou intends to write a book that pulls together his research findings and experiences over the past 30+ years.

Barsalou describes Emory as a great place to work, for three reasons.

"First, my colleagues in the psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience communities offer great resources for developing my work. Second, I've had the privilege of working with terrific students, both graduate and undergraduate. Third, Emory has been very generous in supporting my research and providing the resources needed to perform it."