Cognitivism

For most of modern psychology's history, nobody was allowed to talk about thinking.

This sounds absurd now, but for half of the twentieth century the dominant view in academic psychology was that anything that happened between what went into a person and what came out was off limits. You could study behaviour because you could see it. You could measure a reaction, count a response, observe how long it took. But thought itself, memory, reasoning, the inner monologue you are having right now as you read this, all of that was considered too vague and too invisible to be worth studying seriously. Then in the 1960s a small group of researchers decided they were going to study it anyway, and the trick they used to get away with it was to talk about the mind as if it were a kind of computer. Input, processing, storage, retrieval. The metaphor was not quite right, and they knew it, but it gave them permission to discuss what had been forbidden.

The real revolution was not the computer analogy. The real revolution was the insistence that what happens in your head is a legitimate object of study, that you cannot understand learning or memory or decision making by only watching what people do on the outside. Everything that followed, from cognitive behavioural therapy to working memory research to most of what we now take for granted about how humans learn, rests on the stubborn refusal to pretend the inside of the mind does not exist. The metaphor was temporary scaffolding. The permission to think about thinking is what stayed. What is something you understand about yourself now that you could not have said out loud twenty years ago?

Last week we said the inside of the mind was finally allowed back into the conversation. This week we look at what actually happens in there when a new idea bumps into an old one.