In A Suspicious Science, I analyze the epistemic context of the uses of psychology in contemporary society so as to develop an interdisciplinary, multi-level human science. I distinguish three uses of psychology: positivist-pragmatic empirical study, discursive therapeutic approaches which promote expressive individualism, and reflexive creative practices employed in the arts …
Brain regions might carry out well-defined functions— edge detection in primary visual cortex, “error monitoring” in the anterior cingulate cortex, and so on. But regions don’t function alone, so when they combine in functional circuits or networks, the behavior of the circuit/network might lead to emergent behaviors, as discussed in …
Emergence might be incontrovertible to physicists or mathematicians, but not in neuroscience. Why is it so controversial? One reason seems clear. It’s fair to say that neuroscience follows what could be called Herbert Simon’s dictum: we’re interested and indeed comfortable in taking on research problems and domains that involve near-decomposable …
Neuroscience tends to study parts of the brain separately. The Entangled Brain promotes the idea that, instead, we need to understand the brain as a complex, entangled system. Accordingly, the business of a brain region needs to be situated in the context of multi-region circuits: What does a brain region …
We are very grateful to Jesper Aagaard, Gloria Andrada, Lucy Osler and Jennifer Windt for providing such insightful questions, suggestions, and considerations on our paper. The commentaries address two themes: a set of conceptual questions about the descriptive and normative dimensions of extended mind-wandering, and a set of questions about …
Jelle Bruineberg and Regina Fabry invite us to welcome a new member into the mind wandering family: extended mind wandering (EMW), of which their central example is habitual, diversionary smartphone use. Their proposal builds upon second-wave extended mind theories and mind wandering (MW) research. Adopting Seli and colleagues’ (2018) family …
In their paper “Extended Mind-Wandering”, Jelle Bruineberg and Regina E. Fabry suggest that habitual smartphone use can be conceptualised as a form of extended mind-wandering that should be included in the mind-wandering family. In doing so, they helpfully expand the category of mind-wandering, while also bringing non-task related cognitive processes …
