This book is about psychology as a science. As such, it is a rare book as psychology texts go. This claim is ornery to say the least, since all other books on psychology also aspire to be science. But, science is not science because it engages a unique nomenclature, subject matter, or methodology, but because it has essential standards that cannot be compromised. Science is the discipline that maps the structures of language to sensory events. In preliterate worlds, our senses could only provide us the most rudimentary facts of existence, but as our instruments have progressed, from telescopes and microscopes to particle accelerators and brain scans, what we sense has been progressively mapped to finer and finer aspects of our environment. The details can be and are overwhelming, yet we can still understand the massive complexity of the world by enfolding the details into simple metaphors. We understand the complexities of the physical universe by creating metaphorical conceptions of the roots of heredity, disease, and even the nature of the universe, and thus provide explanations that can be easily grasped by a child.

However, although the metaphors of science are ultimately rooted in a precise and accurate mapping of the actual processes that account for the biological and physical events we daily see, the metaphors of psychology are generally derived from inferred processes that have incomplete, outdated, or nonexistent reference to the actual processes that underlie the workings of the human brain. Although only in the last twenty years or so has neuroscience begun to unravel the actual processes that instigate behavior, it remains that almost all popular and academic psychology continues to ignore, dismiss, and even deride the findings of contemporary neuropsychology.

A psychology that does not root its metaphors in the actual processes which instantiate thought and behavior is not science but narrative, a story which suggests the truth rather than reflects it. This of course casts a shadow on what purports to be the science of psychology as reflected in its popular and academic guises, and the scope of that shadow and its remedy is the substance of this book. The lack of neural realism in psychology, and in particular the common disrespect and disinterest in neuroscience condemns psychology to the trivial babble of the self help column, or to the Babel of incommensurate academic interpretations that talk past each other rather than to each other. But with neural realism comes the opportunity to provide universal standards for the estimation of psychological truth, and to make psychology into the full fledged science that it has always aspired to be.

Although the ideas in this book are rooted in the complex disciplines of learning theory, neuro-psychology, and linguistics, technical references and discussion will be restricted to a substantial treatment in my bibliographical notes. This is in keeping with the purposes of the book, which emulates (I hope) all good science writing. That is, get to the point with simplicity, clarity, and wit, but leave a clear trail (bibliographic and internet sources) for the reader to easily follow.