In Michael Gazzaniga’s recent book, Tales from Both Sides of the Brain, he tells his story of research on split brain patients.  Part of that story includes some of the history of cognitive psychology and all of psychology itself.  The part of the story that Gazzaniga refers to but does not describe was when, in the mid-1970s, partly as a result of his own research, the ideas that the “right brain” did some things and the “left brain” did other things “took off like wild-fire,” as Gazzaniga says.  Perhaps the most famous book that was part of that wild-fire was The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

Behaviorism

What Gazzaniga does not talk about is why did his work ignite this wildfire.  Enough time has now passed that we may be able to revisit this question. In a brief summary of the history of cognitive psychology, Gazzaniga says:

The ideological backbone of American psychology, behaviorism, was dying a slow death, and intellectual centers across the country were waking up to the fact that cognition and the mind itself could be studied.

B.F. Skinner had dealt a death-blow to psychologists from the early 20th century and even to many of his contemporaries by insisting that psychology be based on rigorous scientific observations of the phenomena that psychologists were claiming to be at work.  He, in turn, had overstepped his own research by arguing about the philosophy of the mind as described by Georges Rey. Rey describes Skinner’s arguments against the eventual conclusion of philosophers of the mind that the human mind operates due to its ability to process information in very complex ways, not just in the simple ways B.F. Skinner had identified in his theory of operant conditioning.  Thus, when neurology started to gather some interesting research about what was done by different parts of the brain, discarding the most scientific results in psychology may have combined with discarding other results, such as those from the work of Albert Ellis in rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT).

Rational-emotive Behavior Therapy

Rational-emotive behavior therapy (REBT) is a form of psychological therapy that predated modern cognitive psychology.  It treated people who complained of behaving irrationally.  Ellis had performed research that showed that his therapy was about as effective as psycho-active drugs.  That was not as impressive as Skinner’s results in validating his theory of operant conditioning, but was much better than results elsewhere in psychology.

The basic idea of REBT was that people are not irrational, even when they appear to be.  Such an idea is consistent with the modern philosophy of mind stating that the mind is an information processing phenomenon, which cannot be irrational; the rules of how it operates may merely be unknown.  REBT was able to identify that emotions are very logical, but they are only logical relative to beliefs about the world that the person who is feeling the emotions may not agree with.  Irrational behavior results when some actions taken by a person reflect the beliefs they claim they have, while others of their actions reflect the beliefs that REBT suggests cause the emotions that drive their irrational actions.

Two  Minds

Thus, inherent in the analysis of the human brain that is the basis of REBT is the idea that there are actually two “minds” in the human brain.  One of these minds, which I will call the conscious mind is the one we are aware of.  When we ask a person what they believe, they describe the beliefs in this mind.  The other mind, which I will call the emotional mind, is responsible for creating our emotions.  It is much more difficult for a person to identify the beliefs within this mind.  These beliefs may be inconsistent with the beliefs in the conscious mind.  The therapy of REBT helps a person identify this situation, and to identify the beliefs in their emotional mind that are causing their so-called irrational behavior.  Once these beliefs are identified, REBT proceeds by helping the patient engage in an internal debate about which beliefs are more accurate.  Sometimes both beliefs are modified to some degree, but often, especially when a patient is suffering from severe irrational behavior, it is the beliefs within the emotional mind that need to be changed.  REBT helps the patient change these beliefs.  The remarkable observation in REBT is that once these beliefs are changed, the irrational behavior and troublesome associated emotions change very rapidly.

Focusing

There is another psychological technique that I have used extensively, focusing.  I have always thought Focusing was related to REBT and its analysis that there are two different minds with two sets of beliefs within the human brain.  Today, many people who are interested in the phenomena discovered by Eugene Gendlin in Focusing are exploring these phenomena through the practice of mindfulness.

Gendlin performed observations of psychiatric therapy sessions that led him to develop his practice.  His observation was that people who went to psychiatrists and got better quickly used his technique, while people who did not get better quickly did not use his technique.  This observation may help explain some of the resistance to REBT.  I, myself, have noticed that some people have resisted the analysis of REBT.  Perhaps these people were among those who could benefit from Gendlin’s training.

Two Minds Differ From Split Brain

I suggest that the validity of these two psychological techniques may help to explain why Gazzaniga’s research into the functions of the different sides of the brain ignited such excitement.  I suggest that many psychologists have been more or less aware of the psychological phenomena related to REBT and Focusing.  When they saw that one side of the brain appears to contain most, if not all, of our ability to speak, they jumped to the conclusion that the differentiation of function within the brain being discovered by Gazzaniga was related to their own observations of what I am calling the conscious mind and the emotional mind.  It is now appropriate to conclude that Gazzaniga’s research, although it may be related in some way to the two minds discovered by REBT, is not closely related to the observations of REBT.

Top-down Brain Theory

As a computer scientist, I have contributed to the field of object oriented programming.  I am very aware of the multiple levels of abstraction that are so easy to create in our computer systems.  It appears to me that workers in cognitive science require that they be able to perform very restrictive experiments in order to gain any knowledge of mental processes.  Although this tendency ensures significant scientific validity, it may be too restrictive.

Inherent in the work of neuroscientists is that they are working to understand the human brain from the “bottom-up.”  As a computer scientist, sometimes I design systems from the top-down in addition to designing from the bottom-up.  Within computer science, we acknowledge also working from the “middle-out.”  What this means is that, given the fact that the human brain is an extraordinarily complex information processing system, we can bring some concepts from computer science to bear.  Our insights into how to work from the top-down in complex information processing systems can be particularly important.

I suggest it is appropriate to view REBT, a successful and scientifically validated psychological therapy, and Focusing, a widely used psychological practice, as being scientific observations that much of their analysis is correct.  The fact that their analysis of the operation of the human mind is similar reinforces this view.  As a computer scientist, I claim that if we view this as a top-down analysis, based on observations of the behavior of people, then it is not necessary to connect this analysis to the discoveries of neuroscience.

We can leave this task for the future.  As with top-down and bottom-up design, if they do not eventually meet in the middle, then there is a problem.  In the early stages of analysis or design, it is not necessary to identify the nature of the link-up between the two approaches. The existence of a complex information processing structure provides the mechanism that justifies top-down theories of how it is working.

Moving Forward

It was wonderful to me to find Michael Gazzaniga talking about the complexity of the human brain and how all of the human brain is needed in order to form the human mind.  He identifies the fact that the human brain, and its information processing, have structure, but he does not claim that a single, simple view is likely to explain how the brain functions. I think that we need to assemble many different observations of information processing occurring within the brain that we can observe and describe, and conclude that it is likely many of these different algorithms are working together within the brain to form the totality of the human mind.

I think it is possible to take observations of human behavior, such as our ability to write books, or the validity of the theory of operant conditioning, and use these observations to help assemble theories of some of the information processing phenomena at work within our brains.  In such a task, it is useful to bring people with enough computer science knowledge of artificial intelligence (AI) to help psychologists create top-down theories of the human brain that make sense from an AI perspective.  Psychologists, by themselves, may not be sufficiently knowledgeable about the nature of algorithms and how they build on one another to be able to use AI perspectives to help sort through the possible alternative top-down descriptions of the human brain to identify the most accurate.  This kind of work will be necessary in order to make much headway from the top-down.