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Interview #1 with Prof.
Eleanor Rosch
On "Cognitive Science"
{This
is the first in a series of interviews with Eleanor Rosch,
professor of
psychology at U.C. Berkeley.}
{In some WoK interviews, I will
concentrate
specifically on noted figures in psychology and cognitive science,
because I
want to explore the extent to which the “ways of knowing” issues that
Piet and
I are concerned with can be addressed within a scientific perspective.
Here I
initiate this series by interviewing Prof. Eleanor Rosch, at U.C.
Berkeley. The
first topic I wanted to explore with her was how the field of cognitive
science, and her own understanding of it, have changed over recent
years. She began by replying "what field?"}
ST: (laughs). You're a tough case. Do you think the term "cognitive science"
refers to anything? In past discussions
I've had with you, you basically said "no", but obviously some people
think otherwise.
ER: at the sociological level, yes, it
refers to
"cognitive science" as that is taught. And it refers to all the
cognitive
science courses, the journals, people who identify themselves with the
field,
etc.
ST: yes.
Well the term didn't even exist when I was an undergrad,
although the
component disciplines did: psychology and mathematical linguistics,
mathematical logic and automata theory, etc.—those I studied back in
the
60s. And in grad school I remember
studying AI in its early forms... but I never heard of any "cognitive
science" until perhaps the mid-1970’s. And a little later, when you and
other
people started to make notable contributions to the field, it was still
largely
an umbrella for those other disciplines. And then it gradually changed.
ER: well it developed works that now
look and sound
like "cognitive science.” You can
recognize it—there are some clear cases of it. When a department wants
to hire
someone in that field, there’s usually a debate about whether a
candidate is doing
“cognitive science” or not—so people treat it as something that has a
definition, but they don’t agree about what it is.
Also it's still the case that we here at
ST: U.C.
ER: yes. But
a lot of places have—I'm still talking about the sociological angle—an
interdisciplinary organized research unit with an undergraduate major
but not a
graduate major, so cognitive science is still not a separate department. In those cases, faculty will be half time in
cognitive science and then half-time in psychology or linguistics or
computer
science, etc.
ST: so in your case, it's psychology?
ER: Actually I'm a full-time psychology
professor
(which, by the way, doesn’t mean I have anything to do with clinical
psychology—academic
psychology is completely separate from “shrinks.”)
ST: so you don't think of yourself as a
cognitive
scientist?
ER: most of the people in the cognitive
science
group, which is what it is, have a home department; they are permanent
in some
home department. I'm in psychology, the
linguists are in linguistics, etc.
ST: well I’ll let you decide what we
should
concentrate on today. Normally when I
interview people, I talk with them about their professional field...
but in
this case, you seem to want to avoid that.
ER: Originally I was enthusiastic about
cognitive
science. When it started, I worked on
it, helped organize it here, and actually was the president of the then
new
Cognitive Science Society. I saw
cognitive science as an alternative to behaviorism, which was still
rampant
then in its original form—
ST: you're talking about Skinnerian
stuff, or
something else?
ER: not necessarily Skinner-type
behaviorism; also
the verbal learning/verbal behavior kind—Leo Postman, Geoffrey
Keppel—the whole
point of view that went along with that.
It seemed to me that, unlike behaviorism, in the new discipline
of
cognitive science, people could use their intelligence and their
knowledge of
themselves as humans. It was the computer science aspect that allowed
that,
because all you had to do was to construct a functioning program to
make your
human knowledge legitimate and publishable.
You didn't have to do all the usual constrained compulsive
experiments. How do you come up with the
computer program? Well you know, you notice how things go—
ST: you formalize them.
ER: yes. And
that seemed to me like a fantastic idea.
It was exciting—you could bring in people from all these
different
fields and have an interdisciplinary festival, which it was at first. But that changed.
ST: well maybe it changed for good
reasons...
rather than what you would take as just evidence for the dark forces
being at
work.
ER: (laughs).
Yes.
ST: I mean, I would respect a scientific
impulse
that has trouble accepting some of the things that you and I might like
for
various reasons. I accept that science
has to find its own way to come to grips with these things, and as long
as it
doesn't, I would expect it to forage elsewhere, or even object
strenuously. I'm not sure that
resistance in this case is inappropriate.
ER: well yes, if physics objected to it, that would
be fine. But psychology and perhaps
cognitive science are alleged to be about what human beings actually
are and
the full story of how they function.
ST: so if physics could find a
meaningful basis on
which to object…
ER: yes, but it doesn't, because it
doesn't have
anything to do with anything outside its accepted paradigm.
ST: right.
ER: and that's the point.
Basically, I have two objections to
"cognitive science" and, actually, also to psychology.
One of them, which is just my hobbyhorse, is
that I think they are operating out of a false vision of what a human
being is
and what the material world is.
ST: could you unpack that notion?
ER: yes... I have in a number of papers!
{Both laugh}
ST: no, no... can you describe this
“false vision” now, for a
less specialized audience?
ER: well, you have this image of an
isolated little
information processing system that is confined in its head, and you
hold that
things are the way we assume they are—I mean, it's really much more
folk
psychology than the things that you and I want to deal with, which they
would
ignore as “non-science”. And so in this—in my opinion, too
limited—view, the
material world is the material world, and this little isolated thing
peers out
with its limited sensory organs. It looks around for the things that,
because
of evolution, will allow it to survive and reproduce. And that's the
basis of
all its knowledge and values, and, in fact, its scientific impulses. If
you
believe some of the "scientist in the crib" ideas now fashionable in
some circles... it's supposedly all set up to—
ST: form hypotheses.
ER: right, form hypotheses, evaluate
probabilities,
and act on that basis... and that's all it is!
This thing then builds up its own internal schemas—that's the
only way
it can know anything—it's a kind of Kantian notion.
And so it proceeds. There's
allegedly nothing else! And all of this is
said to derive from the
brain, forget the rest of the body, let alone anything else. This is the current fad: all we need to do is
look at the brain and see which things light up a little bit more (i.e.
have a
little more blood flow) and a little bit less when the system is doing
something. Then we have the complete
explanation. Okay, so I think this is
not an adequate vision of either the organism or its environment. That's my objection number one.
It’s the main objection, but it gives birth
to a corollary problem. Because people
don’t have vision outside the paradigm, they also become blind to
ordinary
scientific logic inside the paradigm.
So, objection number two is that most of
the people
taking this approach just don't think! They are trained and socialized into exactly
what they do, and they do it the way they're supposed to—at least the
good ones
do—but then when they talk about what it means, its applications,
nothing
happens. They have no vision, even at
the "scientific" level. So all
these discoveries are not really as interesting as they are alleged to
be. And people don't change their minds
when you
point this out. Would you like an example?
ST: sure.
ER: okay, Let’s start with the second
issue,
because you don’t have to go outside ordinary accepted scientific
assumptions
and logic to understand it. Let’s use
the topic of dreams to find examples. People in general are interested
in
dreams, and you teach dream practices. I'm not sure how familiar you
are with
the scientific study of dreams...
ST: well we'll see.
ER: okay. We
have the old classic findings that normally people dream during REM
[Rapid Eye
Movement] sleep. The same data suggested
that dreams that occur in non-REM sleep aren't really dream-like;
they're
infrequent and more like waking thought.
So the scientist makes the correspondence between REM and
dreaming. Then if you're going to study
dreaming
scientifically, what do you study? You
study REM! So we have J. Allan Hobson,
who argues that what initiates REM comes from the brainstem, that there
are
waves of activation from the brain stem, and therefore dreams are all
random …
because things get stimulated randomly.
Only afterwards does the dreamer do what Freud would call
"secondary elaboration" (even though Hobson is an anti-Freudian), i.e.
turn the dream into some kind of story, just as you do when you're
awake.
ST: yes, his work goes back to the early
90s, and I
am familiar with it.
ER: yes, OK.
We're getting there. Now the
person who has argued most against this, is Mark Solms.
{Editor's note: examples of their debate
can be
found on the internet by searching their names together.}
ST: I don't know his work.
ER: ah, then you only know half the
story. Solms is a Freudian psychoanalyst,
an M.D.
and a neuroscientist. He approaches
dreams through a different technique; he looks at the clinical
literature on
brain injuries and pathologies. He asks
"in what pathological conditions does human dreaming disappear, and
when
doesn't it" and how is this linked to which sorts of injuries and in
what
parts of the brain? His claim is that
REM is initiated by higher brain centers that have to do with your
fears, desires,
and emotional system—so Freud is right!
Hobson and Solms argue vigorously about this; the debate is
still
raging.
Meanwhile, neuroscience has gone on to
show that
actually you have lots of dreamlike dreams during non-REM
sleep at particular times of the night-researchers just
had to do the right studies to see this.
Previously, researchers were so impressed by the discovery of
the
connection between REM and dreams that to study dreams they'd mostly
only wake
the person up during REM sleep; that way they just kept "confirming"
that dreams are REM. But if you start
looking more closely at non-REM sleep, you discover not only that you
have
“REM-type” dreams during non-REM periods, but that regarding the
question of
"when do dreams start, reliably?" —the answer is, right before you go into REM sleep! So
the
dreaming starts before you're in REM sleep.
Furthermore, when people wake up in the morning and remember a
dream,
that's normally the dream they just had, and usually that's not REM. You tend not to wake up in REM.
So whatever it is that leads you towards
waking up, that stimulates the full-scale alternative realities or
whatever in
dreams.
My suggestion is: isn’t it possible that
dreaming
is what provokes REM, and that we don't have any idea what initiates
the dreams
themselves? In no way do either Hobson
or Solms acknowledge this sort of possibility or any of the data I just
mentioned, even though it comes from fMRI scans and other
state-of-the-art
methods.
ST: would you explain "fMRI"?
ER: It’s the acronym for "functional
magnetic
resonance imaging". That's the kind of MRI that is used in this kind of
research. An ordinary medical MRI shows
structures at one moment only, whereas the fMRI shows the blood flow
over
time. Anyway, this unwillingness to cope
with the full range of data that's available is part of what disturbs
me. It’s
commonplace now.
ST: I see.
Well it's a difficult problem.
They would want to find some way to test your idea, but the only
way
that's currently available includes features that you would consider to
be
begging the question by systematically forcing their interpretation of
the
data. Aren't you arguing for an approach
that doesn't assume at the outset that some sort of brain function is
responsible?
{Editor's note: here and in what
follows, I raise the possibility that the 'standard' research that
Eleanor and I are critiquing is in fact properly adhering to a certain,
reasonable sense of how to proceed. Part of what prompted me to suggest
this as often as I do is that in the actual live interview, we
discussed many more--and sometimes complicated or ambiguous--cases than
appear in this edited text. My quibbles are not as motivated here in
this final version, but I preserved them anyway just to preserve the
flow of the chat.}
ER: well for the present discussion, I'm
perfectly
willing to say that dreaming is a brain state.
But just at the science level, if they considered all the data,
they’d
have the difficult process of trying to find what’s happening during
non-REM REM-like
dreaming, and in particular, what happens before you go into REM when
you're
not getting Hobson's PGO waves and you're not getting Solms' higher
centers
doing their thing, etc. Nobody's
addressing that, because the approach is already set in its groove.
ST: I see... still, either it's the case
that there
is something about a brain-based approach to studying this that would
systematically rule out the kind of approach that you are recommending
be
tried, or there is a way of doing what they're doing that would
legitimately
test what you are talking about, and that you would agree is fair. In
the
latter case, you would just be claiming that there could be such a way
of
interpreting and studying and testing, but that they are not doing it
because
they're just stuck in the habit of pursuing their current lines of
research.
ER: yes, well I told you this was the
boring part
of the complaint. It’s illustrative of
not really thinking even about matters that could fall entirely within the present research paradigm.
Okay now let’s turn to the larger issue of matters outside that
paradigm, and
let’s look at another dream research example that I think points toward
that
larger field. Do you know Rosalyn Cartwright's work?
She studied depressed people, particularly
people who just had a divorce and were depressed about it.
She studied their dreams.
Let me begin by giving you some
background about
this. One of the main findings coming
out of the newest dream research—and it really is very interesting—is
that in
your first dream period of the night, whether you're a human being or a
mouse,
your dreams are about day residue (i.e. events of the preceding day).
The most
stunning illustration of this is with mice who rerun mazes they’ve just
learned,
as soon as they go to sleep (a lot of cutting edge technology is used
to find
this out). There are corresponding human
examples—I don’t want to belabor the point.
But as the night goes on, dreams go on to other material.
Cartwright’s depressed subjects come
into the sleep
lab at night. During the day they're
just going about their ordinary lives, albeit depressed.
Not surprisingly, the first dream of the
night for most of them consists of depressing day-time residue. But as the night goes on, other sorts of
dreams occur, all kinds of dreams about one thing or another. After a year, most of the subjects were not
depressed anymore; they'd just gone on with their lives.
But some people were still depressed. And
they
had a different dreaming pattern.
By now a lot of other research has been
done on
this, so it's not just a matter of waking subjects up and asking what
they’re
dreaming, but of also doing PET and fMRI scans while they sleep and
measuring
blood flow to different regions in the brain .
Here’s the pattern: for non-depressed people and for people who
later
recover from depressions that were brought on by life circumstances
(it’s
called reactive depression), during their sleep and dreams, the areas
of the
frontal lobes of the brain that are involved in logic and planning
become less
active (researchers often say they “shut down,” but what they’re
measuring is
that there’s less blood flow in those regions) while other areas of the
brain
become more active. But with
chronically-depressed people and people in a reactive depression who
don’t
recover, the blood flow to the logic and planning areas does not
decrease; it
may even go up a little.
Now the question I’m getting to is: how
do
researchers interpret this anomaly? What they say is that people who
recover
from reactive depression must be accessing happy childhood memories in
the
later part of the night, and that cheers them up. There
isn’t really any evidence for
that. Actually there are all kinds of
things that these people's minds and their being could be doing at
night that
are interesting... including that they may be dipping down into deeper
levels
of the mind (or of reality if you will) where that whole human being
knows that
whatever is happening that seems so distressing, wasn't really that bad
or at
least wasn't the whole story.
ST: yes, this is what I've been calling
the
realization of "what else is true?" in my meditation courses.
ER: I would like to propose that
versions of this
alternative view be considered.
ST: I would too, for reasons that we've
discussed
and could bring out here at some point.
ER: yes, people have at least the
possibility of
enjoying a kind of lucidity that they’re typically not aware of in
waking life.
ST: and contact, yes... we're always "in"
a reality that is significant to the whole being and has a sort of a
"positive" character in some sense.
ER: right, exactly.
ST: that's a very important thesis,
which I'd like
to unpack at length somewhere.
ER: yes, I made that the guiding light
of my dream
course here.
ST: and it's related to the essence of
my own
dream-practice teachings, which you participated in some years ago.
ER: yes. But
some people can't get into that contact with “a reality significant to
the
whole being that is, in a certain sense, positive,” because they
maintain their
"daytime mind" at night. And
there is a physiological component, namely that the parts of the brain
that are
usually yelling so much, need to amp down or "surrender", or whatever
words you want to use. So isn't that
nice? Unfortunately, the problem is not just that people would not
understand
that hypothesis. Once researchers land
on the notion that it must involve remembering some happy experiences
in your
dreams, that's it! End of story.
ST: no more thinking, yes.
So do you feel they are being untrue to
their own standards? Is it reasonable,
in a sense, for them to take the position they're taking?
ER: Consider
the examples I've just outlined. In the
first case, the Hobson-Solms debate, it is even more true to ordinary
scientific standards to consider the evidence.
In the second case, it does take a leap.
But that’s what shifting paradigms in science are about. The thing is that scientists need to have
contact with the levels and possibilities of their own minds and
greater being,
to be able to handle that; otherwise they either ignore the
possibilities or
treat them as phenomena, just like what they already assume—phenomena
that are
going to give them standard “data.” It’s
like trying to invade the deeper levels of being, establish a colonial
government, and force the natives to grow coffee and rubber for you.
ST: I'm happy to have the examples, they
are very
useful. My point is... on the one hand,
I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying—a lot of it matches things
I've been
saying too, as a teacher of contemplative traditions.
The question is whether the people who want
to do "straight science" are within their rights to resist alternate
perspectives which can't be really firmed up into a clear, testable
hypothesis.
ER: the REM sleep research I mentioned
earlier
involved a testable hypothesis.
ST: yes, perhaps.
ER: As a pure scientist, the first thing
to do
would be to look at what's happening in the whole physiology right
before an
organism goes into REM. You don't even
need to study humans; you can use cats or whatever. My point is that
because
the cognitive scientists don't have a larger perspective, they have
this
scientific tunnel vision no matter what they’re studying.
ST: ah, that's exactly the question I'm
most
concerned with here. On the one hand, I
think that what you're calling the larger perspective is of tremendous
importance ... I've dedicated my whole life to trying to unpack that
for
people, at least directly, existentially.
ER: yes.
ST: the question is whether there are
legitimate
reasons for science to resist assimilating it, because it's just not
methodologically possible yet to do so.
Are they simply being obstructionists, or are they being
reasonable?
ER: well it's never going to be methodologically
possible as long as people don't realize it and don't in some sense
train in
it, because they’re not going to see
the need for it or invent the requisite
methods!
ST: I think that's a very good answer. There are lots of grounds on which you could
argue that. In a sense one simply can't
know what one is trying to let in or represent or even consider, if one
hasn't
experienced it as a human being first.
ER: right!
And there's where you don't know what methods to use or create.
ST: it's a very
cogent response. It's not one that they
may care about, perhaps, but in
that case they'd have stepped off of any scientific basis for rejecting
it.
ER: exactly, it's
just their metaphysics, pure and simple.
ST: and habit, and
institutional variants of those,
etc..
ER: yes, all of
those fit together... when I say
"metaphysics", what I'm thereby trying to get myself out of is saying
it's their "theory".
ST: I hope you can
find ways of pressing this
point. I found you, as a participant in
some of the things I was teaching, to be unusual, because you were
willing to
try to see things as a whole human being, and most people I know who’ve
had
various "positions" that sound similar to yours simply couldn't go
that far... they want to hold a narrower view and then fit what they
can
actually see as a living human being inside a picture,
which is something one “thinks” only in the abstract
sense, rather than preserving it as something a person can fully find
and
appreciate.
ER: exactly.
ST: you're unusual in this respect.
ER: well, that
leads to some difficulties too
(laughs).
ST: I’m sure, but
in a sense, that's what has to
change then. It's not that you should
have to cram yourself into an unnecessarily limited view of the field,
but that
the field has to open up … to be practiced by people
in a fuller sense.
ER: it's clear
that I'm not going to do that in my
lifetime.
ST: of course,
it's a very long-term project. And there
are many factors that will bear on its success. At any rate, thank you
very much for your comments.
ER: you’re very
welcome.