User:Phlsph7/Mind - Fields and methods of inquiry

Fields and methods of inquiry

Various fields of inquiry study the mind, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and cognitive science. They differ from each other in the aspects of mind they investigate and the methods they employ in the process. The study of the mind poses various problems since it is difficult to directly examine, manipulate, and measure it. Trying to circumvent this problem by investigating the brain comes with new challenges of its own, mainly because of the brain's complexity as a neural network consisting of billions of neurons, each with up to 10,000 links to other neurons.

Psychology

Main article: Psychology

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. It investigates conscious and unconscious mental phenomena, including perception, memory, feeling, thought, decision, intelligence, and personality. It is further interested in their outward manifestation in the form of observable behavioral patterns and how these patterns depend on external circumstances and are shaped by learning. Psychology is a wide discipline that includes many subfields. Cognitive psychology is interested in higher-order mental activities like thinking, problem-solving, reasoning, and concept formation. Biological psychology seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms on the physiological level and how they depend on genetic transmission and the environment. Developmental psychology studies the development of the mind from childhood to old age while social psychology examines the influence of social contexts on mind and behavior. Further subfields include comparative, clinical, educational, occupational, and neuropsychology.

Psychologists use a great variety of methods to study the mind. Experimental approaches set up a controlled situation, either in the laboratory or the field, in which they modify independent variables and measure their effects on dependent variables. This approach makes it possible to identify causal relations between the variables. For example, to determine whether people with similar interests (independent variable) are more likely to become friends (dependent variables), participants of a study could be paired with either similar or dissimilar participants. After giving the pairs time to interact, it is assessed whether the members of similar pairs have more positive attitudes towards one another than the members of dissimilar pairs.

Correlational methods examine the strength of association between two variables without establishing a causal relationship between them. The survey method presents participants with a list of questions aimed at eliciting information about their mental attitudes, behavior, and other relevant factors. It analyzes how participants respond to questions and how answers to different questions correlate with one another. Surveys usually have a large number of participants in contrast to case studies, which focus on an in-depth examination of a single subject or a small group of subjects, often to examine rare phenomena or explore new fields. Further methods include longitudinal studies, naturalistic observation, and phenomenological description of experience.

Neuroscience

Main article: Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system. Its primary focus is the central nervous system and the brain in particular, but it also investigates the peripheral nervous system mainly responsible for connecting the central nervous system to the limbs and organs. Neuroscience examines the implementation of mental phenomena on a physiological basis. It covers various levels of analysis; on the small scale, it studies the molecular and cellular basis of the mind, dealing with the constitution of and interaction between individual neurons; on the large scale, it analyzes the architecture of the brain as a whole and its division into regions with different functions.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a neuroimaging technique to detect brain areas with increased neural activity (shown in orange).

Neuroimaging techniques are of particular importance as the main research methods of neuroscientists. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measures changes in the magnetic field of the brain associated with blood flow. Areas of increased blood flow indicate that the corresponding brain region is particularly active. Positron emission tomography (PET) uses radioactive substances to detect a range of metabolic changes in the brain. Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the electrical activity of the brain, usually by placing electrodes on the scalp and measuring the voltage differences between them. These techniques are often employed to measure brain changes under particular circumstances, for example, while engaged in a specific cognitive task. Important insights are also gained from patients and laboratory animals with brain damage in particular areas to assess the function of the damaged area and how its absence affects the remaining brain.

Philosophy

Main article: Philosophy of mind

Philosophy of mind examines the nature of mental phenomena and their relation to the physical world. It seeks to understand the "mark of the mental", that is, the features that all mental states have in common. It further investigates the essence of different types of mental phenomena, such as beliefs, desires, emotions, intentionality, and consciousness while exploring how they are related to one another. Philosophy of mind also examines solutions to the mind–body problem, like dualism, idealism, and physicalism, and assesses arguments for and against them. Further topics are personal identity and free will.

Philosophers use thought experiments to explore the nature of mind and its relation to matter, for example, by imagining how a brain in a vat would experience reality if a supercomputer fed it electrical impulses identical to the ones it would receive under normal circumstances.

While philosophers of mind also include empirical considerations in their inquiry, they differ from fields like psychology and neuroscience by giving significantly more emphasis to non-empirical forms of inquiry. One such method is conceptual analysis, which aims to clarify the meaning of concepts, like mind and intention, by decomposing them to identify their semantic parts. Thought experiments are often used to evoke intuitions about abstract theories to assess their coherence and plausibility: philosophers imagine a situation relevant to a theory and employ counterfactual thinking to assess the possible consequences of this theory, as in the Chinese room argument, Mary the color scientist, and brain in a vat-scenarios. Because of the subjective nature of the mind, the phenomenological method is also commonly used to analyze the structure of consciousness by describing experience from the first-person perspective.

Cognitive science

Main article: Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mental processes. It aims to overcome the challenge of understanding something as complex as the mind by integrating research from diverse fields ranging from psychology and neuroscience to philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. Unlike these disciplines, it is not a unified field but a collaborative effort. One difficulty in synthesizing their insights is that each of these disciplines explores the mind from a different perspective and level of abstraction while using different research methods to arrive at its conclusion.

Cognitive science aims to overcome this difficulty by relying on a unified conceptualization of minds as information processors. This means that mental processes are understood as computations that retrieve, transform, store, and transmit information. For example, perception retrieves sensory information from the environment and transforms it to extract meaningful patterns that can be used in other mental processes, such as planning and decision-making. Cognitive science relies on different levels of description to analyze cognitive processes; the most abstract level focuses on the basic problem the process is supposed to solve and the reasons why the organism needs to solve it; the intermediate level seeks to uncover the algorithm as a formal step-by-step procedure to solve the problem; the most concrete level asks how the algorithm is implemented through physiological changes on the level of the brain. Another methodology to deal with the complexity of the mind is to analyze the mind as a complex system composed of individual subsystems that can be studied independently of one another.

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