24 November 2009
Graduation Oration
Why the mind is like an elephant
Dr Noellie Brockdorff
Faculty of Economics Management & Accountancy
Many of you will be familiar with the old story about six men in the dark who are asked to determine what an elephant is like by touching different parts of the elephant. The man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe…and so on. All may be right in their own way but none have the complete picture. In some ways the traditional approach to investigating the mind has had something of this approach about it. Over the centuries several disciplines have contributed to our knowledge of the mind – philosophy and psychology foremost amongst them – but these had generally used the methodologies of a single discipline and reported the view from their perspective.
In the 1950s, it became evident to researchers in a number of diverse fields that they were working on similar problems related to mind and intelligence - they realised that they were all describing different parts of an elephant. And, furthermore, that no single approach was likely to uncover the workings of the mind - simply describing the bit of elephant they happened to be close to was not going to get them closer to knowing what an elephant is like. The interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence became known as cognitive science. The disciplines that historically contributed to the founding of cognitive science are psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology and philosophy (Miller, 2003). Over the years other fields have also contributed, including education, engineering, sociology and many others.
A brief review of some of the individual approaches of the founding disciplines of cognitive science quickly brings to light how different fields of study whilst apparently trying to find answers to different questions are actually addressing very similar problems.
What does it mean to know something? To have accurate beliefs? To be ignorant or mistaken about something? Answers to these types of questions have been sought by philosophers for millennia. They were much debated by the Greek Philosophers and by later thinkers such as
Descartes, Locke and Kant in their quest for a greater understanding of the nature of knowledge and the human mind.
Cognitive Psychologists look for answers to different types of questions. How do our eyes, ears, noses, gather information about the world? How does the mind pay attention to some aspects of the world but ignore others? How do we learn new information? How is it that we can recall where we parked the car an hour ago? How do we make decisions? These topics came to dominate discussions in this field even more with Cognitive Psychology replacing Behaviourism as the dominant view in psychology from the 1960s onwards.
The field of Linguistics examines issues such as “how do children learn language”?
“How is this different from when adults learn a second language?” “How do we make sense of

sentences we’ve heard for the very first time?” The study of language thus also becomes a means of understanding how the mind works.
Anthropologists carry out research into different cultures; trying to understand how people from different cultures are similar in some ways and the extent to which they differ in others. The study of practices, traditions and rituals in different cultures has resulted in the development of theories about the basic principles of the mind.
That philosophy, psychology, linguistics and anthropology have all contributed to our understanding of the mind, might on reflection not appear that surprising – they are all fields that have human beings at their core. However, arguably the greatest impetus to the birth of cognitive science and a greater understanding of the mind came from advances in computer science and artificial intelligence. The development of the theory of computability and the invention of programmable computers dramatically changed the way people thought about the brain and the mind. Throughout history there has been a tendency to compare the human brain to all sorts of man-made machines; from steam-engines, the telegraph, telephone, accordion, harpsichord and even the jukebox (Boden, 2006). It was therefore perhaps to be expected that the most advanced “machine” of the day is used as a model of the brain. With the advent of the programmable computer, the idea of “the brain as hardware and the mind as software” took hold. The view of the human mind as an information processor became widely accepted and radically changed the way we view the mind. It also proved to be the unifying idea that brought together the various disciplines that had up to that point been following their separate roads to exploring the mind, and gave birth to cognitive science.
One key assumption that distinguishes the cognitive science approach to the study of mind is that when one considers human cognitive activities (such as thinking or remembering) one needs to speak about mental representations (thoughts, memories) and to use a level of analysis that is separate from the biological or neurological (Gardner, 1987).
It is fair to say that there is some debate on the extent to which the concept of “brain as computer” can be useful - certainly our brain is nothing like the computers we have sitting on our desks - and the initial enthusiasm for this idea has waned even among leading cognitivists (e.g., see Boden, 2006 p1220). Nevertheless the underlying idea inspired a generation of researchers that were instrumental in the establishing of cognitive science, and has permitted us to explore brain and mind further than we would have been able to do without it.
It is now routine practice for computed tomography (CT) scans and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to be used in medicine. These now commonly used techniques have revolutionised one of the original contributing disciplines of cognitive science: Neuroscience
– the field of study that seeks to understand the structure and function of the brain. Previously, the study of living human brains was severely limited; it was largely confined to the study of patients with brain deficits, and examination and stimulation of the brain during brain surgery. All other studies on the human brain had to be carried out post mortem. Further refinement of the MRI technique in the middle of the 1990s led to the introduction of functional MRI that allows us to measure brain function in healthy human beings at all ages, repeatedly and safely. Whilst in the past we could only observe people’s actions and measure their performance on tests in terms of how fast they were or how accurate, functional MRI allows us to observe brain function during these actions.

The impact of the new brain-imaging techniques on all those disciplines involved in the study of the mind and the brain was enormous. No t only has functional MRI become the “must have” methodology in a host of different fields but it has also increased the need for interdisciplinary collaboration.
The interdisciplinary collaboration that takes place in cognitive science is very wide ranging. Philosophers, psychologists and medical researchers investigate the often subtle cognitive changes brought about by normal aging in addition to the more dramatic, distinctive changes brought about by disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Philosophers engage in research with neuroscientists who produce images of the actual pattern of activity in the brain when people read, look at different pictures, encode and retrieve memories and perform other cognitive tasks. Experimental psychologist, neuroscientists and philosophers work together to investigate how a false memory can be implanted that is stronger than the memory of things actually seen (Tang, 1999).
There are also many illustrations of how the knowledge and discoveries in one discipline can have applications in another field as well as helping us to explain the everyday and the familiar. Those of us who have visited a Chinese restaurant often comment on the fact that
Chinese food has so much more flavour; and we usually attribute this to the cooking process employed and the ingredients used. But there’s another reason – after one minute of continuous eating our taste buds adapt. After that, food tends to lose its initial burst of flavour. But if you keep switching between different foods – as you typically do when eating in Chinese restaurants
– your taste buds don’t adapt and you have fresh bursts of flavour throughout the meal. A related mechanism – sensory adaptation - is widely known to marketing and advertising practitioners; if advertising is repeated very often we tend to get so used to it that we no longer
“see” it and advertisers need to devise different, more exciting ads to keep the “flavour” flowing to our senses.
Research findings from some of the cognitive sciences have been applied to questions that concern many parents and teachers. Why is it that children who are otherwise smart and motivated, and are properly taught have difficulties in learning how to read and write? In some cases dyslexia can be the cause. Famous successful dyslexics have included Leonardo Da
Vinci (allegedly), Albert Einstein, Walt Disney, Winston Churchill and Richard Branson.
Possible underlying biological causes in some cases of dyslexia have been identified by combining findings from studies in different fields and using different methodologies. For example, one study involved the post mortem comparison of the brains of dyslexics and nondyslexics (Livingstone et al, 1991) whilst another study used functional MRI that examined dyslexics and non-dyslexics while they viewed pictures of moving objects (Eden et al, 1996).
These and similar findings point to some dyslexics having enhanced perceptions of shapes, colours, vowels and bass tones which might explain why many dyslexics become artists, poets and musicians (Ratey, 2001).
Cross-disciplinary collaborations are not always given a warm welcome by all. One very recent interdisciplinary field has produced fears in some people that advertisers will soon be able to control what we think and what we do to such an extent that we will end up with armies of consumer zombies. These apocalyptic visions were produced by the birth of a new area of collaborative research called neuromarketing. This new discipline seeks to apply the methods and findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to analyze and understand human

behaviour in marketing situations. The early predictions of the possibility of mind-control by advertisers proved to be exaggerated and unfounded. Research in neuromarketing focuses on trying to gain further understanding of questions that have long been of interest in marketing
(Senior & Lee, 2008).
A recent functional MRI study (Plassmann et al, 2008) in this area gives us a flavour of the sort of investigations that are undertaken. In this study participants tasted samples of red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon) and were told the price of the wine. They were asked to rate the pleasantness of each wine while their brain was scanned using functional MRI. Regardless of the real cost of the wine, people reported a more pleasant tasting experience if they were told that the wine costs more. Activity in the reward-related regions in the brain also increased when the participants believed they were drinking more expensive wine. This is evidence that marketing action (price, in this case) unrelated to the actual taste sensation can actually affect consumers’ subjective perception of pleasantness.
As an area of academic study in its own right, cognitive science is still relatively young.
The University of California, San Diego was the first university in the world to establish a cognitive science department in 1986 and the first PhD in Cognitive Science was awarded in
1991 by Lund University. There is as yet no department of cognitive science at the University of
Malta, nor do we offer a program in cognitive science. This is not to say that there is no expertise in cognitive science at the University of Malta. Far from it, many of the contributing disciplines of cognitive science have thriving departments - we do very well in describing individual parts of the elephant. It is unfortunate that the expertise that is found in these departments is not yet being harnessed in an interdisciplinary venture on cognitive science within the University of Malta. Sometimes we find ourselves in the rather absurd situation that we are collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines outside Malta but not with colleagues in those same disciplines within our own University. I conclude by expressing the hope that the
University authorities would encourage and support initiatives for departments to work more closely together in the exciting field of cognitive science – let us switch on the light and see what that elephant is really like.
References
Boden, M. A. (2006). Mind as Machine: A history of Cognitive Science. New York: Oxford
University Press
Gardner, H. (1987). The mind’s new science. BasicBooks.
Miller, G.A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 7, 141-144
Plassmann, H., O’Doherty, J., Shiv, B., Rangel, A. (2008) Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, 105, 1050-1054.
Ratey, J. (2001). A user’s guide to the brain. London: Abacus
Senior, C. & Lee, N. (2008). Editorial: A manifesto for neuromarketing science. Journal of
Consumer Behaviour, 7, 26-271.
Tang, P.C.L. (1999). Recent literature on Cognitive Science. The Social Science Journal, 36(4), p675-686.

Jesuits’ Church, Valletta
24 th
November 2009