"When proto-humanity learned how to generalize about the structure of the natural world, to classify similar objects under identical labels- in short, to exploit the power of metaphor-it latched onto a wonderful trick for simplifying what would otherwise be complex beyond human understanding p.11 (Cohen and Stewart, 1994) The Collapse of Chaos, Viking, New York ,1994

"The more the universe seem comprehensible, the more it seems pointless." This sentiment, expressed by the physicist Steven Weinberg, is a coda for a shadowy truth that scientists rarely admit, but unconsciously dread. Science has progressively revealed a universe that is mechanistic, mathematical, knowable, and manipulable by human minds. But this reality has no implicit purpose, value, or direction. A melioristic cosmos, or a universe imbued with value, is a fiction bestowed by theologians, mystics, and the superstitious. Value, if any is to be had, is reduced to the conflicted motives bestowed by a twisted rosary of a million genes. At root, we are merely actors who flesh out in linguistic metaphor the stage directions that are hardwired into dozens of instincts, and are guided by the invisible hand of natural selection.

The ideas that we treasure in science are those that bestow descriptive comprehensiveness and power to the simplest metaphors. As linguistically embodied by Copernican orbits, Newtonian concepts of mass and force, and Einstein’s bending of space and time, they allow us to visualize reality, and to spin the universe from an image, and encode it in a phrase.

The power of science rests in the power of the metaphors it invokes that allow us to understand and control our world. But science, to be science, must be ornery; and it continually replaces our intuitive perceptions with new ways of seeing that are at variance with how we natively perceive the world. Our senses reveal to us that the sun orbits the earth, that time flows, and that life is unchanging. To those minds uninformed by science, these perceptions are embodied in religious metaphor that is validated by holy writ. Science of course decrees otherwise. And so, the sun becomes immobile, time is frozen, and life evolves. The determined hand of God is replaced by a quantum dice game attended by no One.

We judge our knowledge by the metaphors we use to understand our world. They determine what to pay attention to, what to ignore, and what to dismiss. They are the perceptual lenses that permit us to make sense of the world, and to neatly summarize the endless facts of existence. To an ancient Sumerian, an orbiting sun and stars perfectly summarizes the day, and night, and a starry sky. When noted systematically, these correlations could be gauged by hedgerows of stone, and used to predict tides and seasons, and with an imperfection slanted to reflect certitude, the fates of men. To a twentieth century physicist, the same orbits were perceived through a Newtonian lens, and the mechanism of motion was extended beyond tides and eclipses to the motion of pistons, the trajectory of the rockets and the fate of the universe. To a Sumerian priest and the physicist the universe is easy explained, and each follow from a different mental image underlying their implicit reasoning that is as tightly wound and predictable as the movements of a clockwork spring. But what is it that can make even a Sumerian toss aside the astronomical models and metaphors that sustain his worldview and worldly values? What makes for a revolution that settles age-old arguments with a single revealing glance, and instantly casts disbelievers as either blind or fools?

New ideas are not revolutionary ideas if they are beautiful, useful, or simple, since these ultimately reflect human prejudices. After all, nature can be ugly, useless, and complex and we can still deal with it and get to work on time. Rather, revolutions occur when the resolving power of our tools permit us to actually view new and totally different sets of facts, and force us to change the metaphorical perspective that we use for the ready categorization of the events we daily see. For example, Copernicus’ heliocentric or sun centered theory of the solar system was a mere intellectual curio until Galileo and his telescope demonstrated that the events his theory denoted were in fact real. Similarly, disease or genetically based models for human health never supplanted vitalistic models until the microscope and other tools permitted Pasteur and others to lay bare the microbiological basis of living things. Although the macro and micro universes begat by the likes of Copernicus and Pasteur reveal a greater complexity to the facts of existence than if we were to mount the universe on a gigantic turtle, or adduce all our aches and pains to evil spirits, they also provide equally simple metaphorical representations of how the world ‘works’. And the latter is where the true import of revolutions lies. Thus, armed with the simple visualization of solar systems and viral agents of disease, we think ourselves infinitely superior to our ignorant ancestors, whose metaphors of Gods and Goddesses, universal spirits, illness causing vapors and crystal spheres now seem laughably arcane.

The last major area of human inquiry in need of a revolution is the human mind, if for no more compelling reason than the fact that only in recent years have the processes behind human learning, emotion, memory, etc. revealed themselves to the probing instrumentalities of science. Unlike previous revolutions in science, the cognitive revolution of the late 20^th and early 21^st century is led by no single seminal figure, drives a view of mental life that seems obvious in retrospect, and is occurring almost in spite of itself. Its implications are only recently beginning to be understood, and at first glance do not seem to have the earth shaking import of the revolutions in physics and biology that have so radically changed the way we act and think. Nonetheless, it will overturn everything, from philosophy to practical psychology, and in ways that will be altogether surprising, and ironically not in keeping with the theoretical and practical import of the scientific revolutions of the past that unexpectedly begat wonder drugs and trips to the moon. But in its essentials, the rapid growth in knowledge of the actual processes that underlie behavior will profoundly change the world from the simple metaphors it bestows that will provide a clarifying conceptual lens to the muddle of events that we daily perceive.

This knowledge does not come a moment too soon. Confronted with a psychology that mounts a babel of conflicting theories that pose an endless cascade of inferred mental processes, one can quickly lose hope in making sense of it all, and resign one’s confusion to the ageless inscrutability of the human condition. But the Gordian knot (or should we say tangle) implicates the human mind, but is not grounded to it. Hence it cannot be validated. Just as prior to the telescope any number of celestial schemes could be hypothesized to make the universe ‘work’, so too is psychology burdened by countless theories that detach themselves from empirical reality like ephemeral soap bubbles. Given this confusion, it would seem that the availability of an accurate perspective of how minds actually work would seem to be compelling enough for psychologists to a least take the time to look, at least for a second. Simple enough, until one remembers a similar offering made by a Pisan astronomer some centuries ago.

Carola Baumgardt, Johannes Kepler; Life and Letters, Philosophical Library, New York, 1951, p.86

In his correspondence, and in the margins of his manuscripts, Galileo had simple words for them: buffoons, liars, idiots, fools! His obstinacy against the perceived idiocy of his day ended in his exile, not as much for heresy as for rudeness. For Galileo did not recognize, as his adversaries surely did, that revolutions are more than new sets of facts, but impact manners and mores and the destiny of mankind itself. Galileo’s truth was insensitive to these implications, and to shout it so obstinately was just plain rude! Although Galileo noted rightly that his ideas were theoretically and realistically sound, as many of his peers in and out of the church surely did, the social implications were another matter. A mechanistic solar system ruled out the continuous intervention of the hand of God, replacing miracles with endless calculations. Furthermore, it moved mankind from the center of the universe to its periphery, thus making mankind much less important in the cosmic scheme of things. Finally, a sun-centered solar system didn’t really alter the problems that impacted common people. Earth centered models predicted just as well the movements of the heavens. So true or not, out of sight was out of mind, and for the prelates who passed on Galileo’s offer, averting one’s eyes was rebuttal enough.

Of course, history has demonstrated with ample irony that complex knowledge bestows mastery, that dehumanization vanishes with the broadening of the intellect, and that the redundancy of different solutions has a way of sifting out the intellectual chaff of flat earths and looping suns. Nonetheless, when human behavior is concerned, although the mysteries surrounding the neuro-psychological processes underlying behavior are being fast resolved, mainstream psychologists continue to view such knowledge as tangential to their concerns. Following arguments not dissimilar to Galileo’s scoffing prelates, to a psychologist concerned with human personality, social behavior, or psychotherapy, an appeal to neuro-psychological causes is something they would rather not look at. After all, it adds an unacceptable level of complexity (How indeed to account for all those zillions of neurons?), dehumanizes human experience by deconstructing it, and doesn’t impact the problems of his or her concern. In other words, there’s no interest, even if you were to offer to show them a thousand times the neural equivalent of the planets and the moon.

Valid points? Ultimately, the answer is dependent upon how one uses such information. Knowledge of neuro-psychological processes may be used to provide predictions of behavior or it may be used for explanations for behavior. The former requires a mastery of the technical language of neuroscience, ‘privileges’ that language through the de-facto focus on neurological causes, and bridges with difficulty to the very different data languages used by mainstream psychology. For example, any perusal of the technical journalistic literature of neuroscience would reveal a complex data language populated with opaque terminology such as basal ganglia, potentiation, positive ions, and the like. Moreover, this language is also privileged, and is used to the exclusion of other data languages (e.g. the subjective language of experience) that may map, however imperfectly, to neural events. Finally, such a language does not bridge easily to other data languages in psychology. How for example would a measurement of ‘dopamine spikes’ map to the subjective experience?

However, whereas neuroscience, as a predictive science, can hardly be integrated with the data languages spoken by counseling, social, or humanistic psychology, it can be integrated with such languages to deepen and enhance explanations for behavior. We use the singular theoretical language of a specialist to solve problems, but we compare simplified or meta-theoretical languages to decide the formal language that best fits the problems we encounter. In other words, because we can explain a phenomenon such a bouncing ball with simple conversational languages that implicate subjective experience, Newtonian forces, or even Einstein concepts of space and time, we are therefore enabled to choose the formal language that best meets the demands of the problem at hand. Hence, we can use a subjective language (e.g. throw the ball hard) if we want easy but imprecise solutions to moving the ball, or we can use a mathematical language (e.g. mass times acceleration) to arrive at difficult but precise solutions to the same problem. Likewise, we can use subjective language to describe on emotional outburst (Bob got frustrated and hit the wall), or we can also engage more precise terminology to map the neural processes behind emotion.

For a prelate in Galileo’s time, the ability to predict discounted the need to explain. Hence, because the existing models predicted well enough the positions of the sun and planets, there was no need to introduce simple explanatory models of the universe that seemed to bestow only marginal predictive power. Likewise, for a psychologist who is confident in his prediction of an individual’s behavior through the postulation of inferred mental processes that are ungrounded to actual neural processes, his ability to predict also obviates his need to explain. Thus the human mind can be as airily determined as the stars in a pre-Galilean sky. Yet for both present day psychologists and 17th century Benedictines whose manner of deciding debate is through its artful avoidance, explanations can be dangerous things. Explanations are dangerous not because they provide different levels of analysis that point to different naming schemes for the facts of existence, but because these different perspectives correct for distinctive processes that are inferred by other data languages. Indeed, the greatest threat to the sacrosanct theories held by most psychologists are deep explanations that eliminate all those inferred causes that animate behavior in ways not dissimilar to the invisible angels who at God’s behest guided the motions of the planets and stars.

In a well known cartoon, a scientist presents a chalk board full of equations to a colleague, and just before reaching the desired solution is the scribbled in factor that makes all the equations work: ‘And here a miracle occurs!’ The cartoon would lose little irony if the word miracle were replaced with ‘inferred process’, since after all inferring a process generally implies deferring its explanation. Thus you can get to your desired answer by deferring an accounting for the details, and ignore entirely how a different level of analysis may contribute to precision in prediction. Of course, in real life as in mathematics, poorly defined terms are passed along to poorly defined results, and as inferred processes multiply unabated, precision is found only if one has tolerance for ad hoc theories that predict nothing but the past. An explanation of course entails how a selection between possibilities determines the language one will use, but it also limits or corrects for the inferred processes that you may engage to make your argument ‘work’. In other words, knowledge of the different meta-theoretical languages that describe any phenomenon allows one to distinguish between terms that denote actual processes and those that are mere metaphor. For example, a person may describe a headache as like having bees in his bonnet or demons dancing in his head. To a naïve observer, it would be easy to infer the reality of bees and demons as a cause of headaches. For the rest of us who are familiar with the meta-theoretical language of disease, we can easily note that bees and demons are mere metaphors that indirectly denote the real inferred process that represents the neurological processes that create headaches.

Although the devil may be in the details, ignoring the details can literally put a devil in your head. Because all psychological theories engage the use of metaphorical structures that, depending upon individual interpretation, may or may not denote inferred processes, confusion can only be avoided through the comparative use of different methodologies and their respective data languages. Only by being able to move between different languages that describe the same phenomena can one distinguish the metaphorical from the real.

The problem of course is that this position replaces logical analysis with a linguistic analysis, and the preeminence of the specialist with the integrating mind of the generalist. That of course would require a radical shift in psychology from a confusing welter of disciplines that talk past rather than to each other to a psychology that integrates different methodologies and their accompanying perspectives. This new view of psychology would exalt the theoretician who would above all recognize the unifying power of a true understanding of how our minds actually work, and that truth is not privileged to one method and perspective, but to all. But radical shifts depend upon radical observations, or new conceptual frameworks that cast familiar events in radical ways.

It was like a gigantic train set. If you know all the arrival and departure times for all the places they travel, then you can map out the routes. It was just a simple matter of observing and plotting, an easy albeit tedious job. So just sit down, look up, and jot it all down. Naturally, a pattern emerges from this pointillist skein of data, and with a bit of guidance from scripture and the physics of common sense it makes a picture wholly delightful and satisfying.

And this is what observation of the night sky gets you, a stationary earth circled by a sun that is itself the center of the orbits of the planets. Well, at least that’s where it led for the 16^th century astronomer Tycho Brahe. An entrepreneur, astronomer, and petty tyrant, Brahe brandished a silver tipped nose (his original was partially lost in a duel with a rival), an intellectual arrogance not dissimilar from a contemporary Silicon Valley mogul, and an explorer’s passion to discover and chart the whole of creation. Given title and rents to a barren island off Denmark by the Danish king, Brahe set up a post-medieval version of a think tank and astronomical observatory, complete with fish ponds, a printing press, a mill for grinding corn, and a windmill and pump that supplied running water – "all for the care and feeding of astronomers" (Boorstin, 1983 p.307). It was an odd observatory, since at the time there were no telescopes to be had. Transoms and compasses and enclosed pits with rifle sitings were the tools of his trade, and with such rudimentary instruments Tycho and his staff accurately mapped the comings and goings of all the visible objects in the night sky.

Figure 3. The Man with the Silver Nose

Although to the naked eye the stars still arrive on time and from the same directions as noted by Tycho, a telescope changes the perspective, and demonstrates that the stars and planets actually run in totally different directions. Thus, depending upon how you make observations, similar data look differently and act differently; and by changing the way we look at the heavens, we also change the way we look at the physics of everyday life. Brahe’s observations were not invalidated, but were rather cast against a new conceptual framework, forcing the mind to interpret two entirely different perspectives on the world, depending upon how you looked at it of course. Ultimately, in life as in astronomy, it’s not the facts of life that are in dispute, but the metaphorical or conceptual frameworks that we nonconsciously cast those facts. We can frame life in terms of atoms, or cells, or consciousness, but understanding depends upon our flexibility in moving between conceptual frameworks that is bestowed by our knowledge of the strongly metaphorical content of language. The flexibility to move between conceptual frameworks, and the fact that we can compare and contrast those frameworks allow one to distinguish the metaphorical from the real, and ironically make reality from the stuff of metaphor. This flexibility alone is the critical basis for a true understanding of ourselves, since it forces us to consider how our language shapes the way we envision our world. The new frameworks bestowed by the resolving power of our tools are not obvious, but subtle, yet can move our perspective with the radical ease of a simple glance through Galileo’s telescope. It just depends upon how you look at it.

Mirroring the accomplishment of Tycho and his predecessors, psychology is not in want of observations that catalog human predilections that prove to be as eccentric as the movements of the planets in the night sky. But the facts of existence are not the point, nor are the individual interpretations one may give to any aspect of behavior, from phobias to falling in love. The primary question is ultimately not what we think or know about behavior, but how we think about behavior. And remarkably, the how is innocuous, obvious in retrospect, and for the most part, imperceptible.

Of course it starts with language. Our days to day problems, from math to physics to psychology are neatly summarized and generally predictable by the conventions of language. The information that is grist for the machinations of common sense, logic, or the computing machines that process that logic is interpreted literally bit by bit. The linear or serial processing of information follows neatly into the syntactical structure of subject, object, and predicate. Unfortunately, nature does not work in single dimensions and neither does the human mind. Particularly when precision is key, the answers to the questions of life are multiple and simultaneous.

In mathematics, it is simultaneous equations that allow you to predict the movements of basketballs and moons, and even common sense forces one to look at multiple concurrent causes spanning reason to instinct to emotions. The problem is that although we recognize in principle that singular causes are invariably simplistic causes, our common language can only with difficulty accommodate them. Thus language is served through undefined and inferred processes imbedded in a linear language. The fact that often we act or don’t act because of extra-logical causes that are hidden in the convoluted machinations of the mind forces us to place ciphers in the equation that make it all work. These ciphers, or faculties, neatly shorten or parse communication. Thus, when we say that Johnny studies hard through force of habit, an act of will, or a need for achievement, we defer an accounting of the true causes of his behavior, but speed communication through the implication that at least the general causes of his behavior are known.

The use of mental faculties or faculty psychology pervades common sense and much of academic psychology, but it fits the facts of behavior into a metaphorical framework no less restrictive and wrong as the prevalent physical models of the universe in the advent of the telescope. And like the planetary loop the loops that were continually interposed on the solar system to make the whole thing work, understanding comes at the simple cost of adding an instinct here, a drive there, with room enough for a need or two to make a miracle happen. But just as a two dimensional perspective can hardly describe a three dimensional space, so do linear models break down when confronted with the true realities of the mind. For adding a dimension to behavior necessarily reduces the abundance of terms that are necessary to form an explanation or form an argument, and that is the budding promise of a cognitive science reborn.

It implies an inheritance and maturation, an advancement over points of view that are soon to become obsolete. But unlike succeeding models of autos, TV’s, and software, a second generation science of mind is ‘new and improved’ not because it better appeals to taste or functionality, but because it is built upon sounder and more realistic assumptions about the mind. That is, second generation cognitive science is not about philosophy, it is about method.

All sciences of course are validated when they thoroughly map to real empirical events. Without such an anchor, theories could proliferate that would seem to work, would work only with narrow subsets of data, or work only through convoluted, obscure, and ad hoc processes. Witness of course the profligate theorizing that made the early versions of the physical sciences into an impenetrable cacophony of competing, dissimilar, and contradictory theories. So presumably, a methodology that can anchor knowledge to neural events would be a boon, and would be adopted with enthusiasm by one and all. Well, not exactly.

The availability of a new method does not entail that it will be used or that its results would be utilized or even respected by other scientists. In particular, methodologies that lay bare the actual neural processes that underlie behavior require the adoption of a new verbal lexicon, are difficult to implement for a non-specialist, and produce results that are hard to integrate with the conclusions derived from other research methods. So, although the unavailability and usefulness of a method is one thing, it is quite another to adopt and integrate it with methods and data languages already known.

What is required is something more, namely a new and realistic metaphorical framework that, like the revolution spawned by Galileo, cannot be ignored. New metaphorical frameworks can provide simpler and more elegant conceptualizations of the problems we have at hand, but as importantly, the reality underscored by these frameworks eliminates or corrects for procedures borne of alternative frameworks that do not reflect similar facts. In this way, limitations of other research methods are at once revealed, with the result that the procedures and theories derived from those methods must be either altered or abandoned. Thus psychologists, unlike Galileo’s skeptical friars, are forced to take a look.

For example, the metaphorical framework of the solar system as advanced by Copernicus provided a simpler and more elegant solution to the movements of the planets, but it did not and could not supplant the more complex Ptolemaic system that posited the earth at the center of the universe. When Copernicus’ framework was revealed to map much more precisely to the actual behavior of the solar system, the Ptolemaic procedures, although perfectly functional, were immediately rendered obsolete. Similarly, procedures in psychology that seem to work, such as Rorschach tests, exorcisms, and phrenology, are rarely if ever used because they denote a reality that does not exist. Yet for every inferred process dispelled by the knowledge about how our minds actually work, there are dozens more that remain fixed in the popular and academic imagination as representative of unique yet undiscovered aspects of the human mind. Meditative, hypnotic, and ‘flow’ states are among the innumerable and spurious special processes that populate psychology. As we shall soon discuss, such states are invariably composed of sub-processes that are interpreted literally, proceed linearly, and are hypothesized almost at whim. Thus a meditative ‘state’ follows a process of concentrated attention, a hypnotic ‘state’ follows a process of suggestion, and a flow ‘state’ occurs when one is absorbed in some task. In addition, additional sub-processes such as psychic energy, intrinsic motivation, trance state and so forth are added to the mix, creating endless theoretical variants that at the very least provide a source for innumerable journal articles and pop psychology books.

If behavior is the result of literal and linear processes, then there is no need to seek the neural events that map to them. But if the abstract language of behavior is primarily metaphorical, and if behavior is the result of disparate neural processes acting in parallel, then behavioral theories that do not or cannot denote such processes are incomplete, misleading, or wrong. And the latter comprise the two essential premises of second-generation cognitive science:

A psychology that mismatches its data to outdated conceptual structures is as sadly out of date as Brahe’s universal train set. But such a judgement implied by this new view of cognitive science is unabashedly rude, since it rejects psychological theories prior to an estimate of their substantive product. Like the celestial mechanics of Ptolemy, the product of all those calculations means nothing if those calculations are mapped to nothing. This makes second generation cognitive science as disruptive and destructive to contemporary psychology as the wrenching perspective of the cosmos that Galileo forced on a self-satisfied world. These premises seem simple and obvious, but are integral to emerging schools of thought in linguistics, neuro-psychology, and learning theory that will totally recast the way we see psychology and will reinterpret in surprising ways the boundless facts of past and present research.

As we will see, psychology will never be the same.