Why Brains Are Not Computers, Why Behaviorism Is Not Satanism, and Why Dolphins Are Not Aquatic Apes.
Brains are not computers — talk about the whole organism in its environment, not hidden code.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Barrett (2016) wrote a short, sharp essay.
He told behavior analysts to stop saying brains are computers.
He used jokes about dolphins and Satan to make the point.
No new data were collected; the paper is pure argument.
What they found
The ‘brain-as-computer’ story hurts our field.
It pushes us to look inside the head instead of at the environment.
Louise says cognition is not code; it is embodied action that evolves with the world.
How this fits with other research
Morris et al. (1982) said the same thing 34 years earlier: drop cognitive buzzwords.
Barrett (2016) just updates the warning for the MRI era.
Otrebski (2005) adds a tool — the mereological fallacy — that shows why saying ‘the brain decides’ is sloppy.
Together, the three papers form a chain: old critique, philosophical rule, new rally cry.
Furrebøe et al. (2017) extends the fight into consumer science.
They show the anti-mentalism Louise defends can explain ‘irrational’ shopping without any computer metaphors.
Why it matters
Next time you write a report, scan for sneaky cyber-talk.
Replace ‘his brain processed the cue’ with ‘the cue occasioned the response.’
Your language will stay behavioral, your interventions will stay environmental, and your credibility will stay intact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Modern psychology has, to all intents and purposes, become synonymous with cognitive psychology, with an emphasis on the idea that the brain is a form of computer, whose job is to take in sensory input, process information, and produce motor output. This places the brain at a remove from both the body and environment and denies the intimate connection that exists between them. As a result, a great injustice is done to both human and nonhuman animals: On the one hand, we fail to recognize the distinctive nature of nonhuman cognition, and on the other hand, we continue to promote a somewhat misleading view of human psychological capacities. Here, I suggest a more mutualistic, embodied, enactive view might allow us to ask more interesting questions about how animals of all kinds come to know their worlds, in ways that avoid the (inevitable) anthropocentric baggage of the cognitivist viewpoint.
The Behavior analyst, 2016 · doi:10.1163/156853003322773069