Does Nature Versus Nurture Makes Sense?

 My PsycCRITIQUES review is about to release for James Tabery's book "Beyond Versus: The Struggle to Understand the Interaction of Nature and Nurture." Here are some highlights:

What do we know for sure about the brain

If I was going to list everything we knew for sure about the brain, it would be a very, very long list. Instead of trying to do that, I am going to focus on things we know relevant to my last post, which was quite negative about the new "brain mapping" initiative, and which generated a lot of criticism
(http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/fixing-psychology/201304/why-brain-mapping-is-stupid-idea). The title of the post then, should maybe be less “What do we know about the brain?” and more “What are some first principles we can use to understand how the brain operates?”

Why the Brain Mapping project is a Stupid Idea

It was just announced that President Obama wants to start spending one hundred million dollars to "map the brain", and that his oft-times rival Eric Cantor thinks it’s a great idea. But it is a terrible idea, because I can tell you, right now, about half of the big lessons they will learn. Plus, for about a million dollars, I could probably gather a group of experts together to tell you about half of what remains. I'm not sure what, exactly, would be left after that, but I'm sure it would be comparatively cheap to figure out. 

Psychological Science isn't all bad

When I first started this blog, one of my ideas was to digitize my "most absurd article" and "most incoherent title" awards for articles in Psychological Science. This was a game I played with office mates back in grad school. For example, I just jumped back to May 2003 and found: 

What is wrong with Infant Looking Research

In a brief diversion from the ecological psychology stuff, a few people have asked me to comment on the recent popular press pieces regarding Elizabeth Spelke, and her amazing claims about infants.

Spelke and Susan Carey at Harvard, Renée Baillargeon at Illinois, and Karen Wynn at Yale are the matriarchs of the large literature using looking time to study cognition in infancy. Including their students, and others, many researchers are now active in this field, and my dissertation used looking time as its dependent variable. Other common labels in the literature include gaze duration, preferential looking time, orientation, ocular fixation, visual fixation, and attention. The history of this literature is fascinating, and the flaws in the current methods are deep. Looking time measures have a long history, but have only recently come to be used to assess infant’s insights into events. Thus, in an unusual twist, most of the criticisms of  this literature are based on long traditions of empirical work that existed before the criticized work started, and more recent research supports the criticisms.

Beyond the Brain: Intro

Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, by Louise Barrett was released earlier this year. I just finished writing a review of it for PsycCritiques (The American Psychological Association online journal that used to be the printed Contemporary Psychology). So, first things first: Highly recommended.

Fixing Psychology (Mission Statement: Take 1)

Doug Candland gave the Arthur Staats Lecture for Unifying Psychology in 2010. He was a strong influence during my undergraduate education, and has been a trusted adviser since. Though he has feigned asking me for advice many times -- I say 'feigned', because it often seems to be an extension of an oral exam we started over a decade ago -- he seemed to be actually asking for my advice when we talked about what he might say in his lecture. I'm not sure how much I influenced the talk, but I was quoted once. The title of his talk was "The End of Psychology." During the conclusion, he gave the caveat that he could be completely mistaken, that one of his students had told him "Psychology can not be over, it never really began."

Psychology is broken in many, many ways. It is broken at every level. At the lowest level, Intro Psych is one of the most poorly conceived courses in the college curriculum; at the highest level, the arguments of famous 'top researchers' are based on faulty premises or are more oriented towards public appeal than any scientific value or philosophical rigor. Further, psychology is broken at its core. The dominant framework of cognitive psychology has failed, and while much of the field has accepted that in practice, they deny it in discourse. That is to say, many people are trying to modify, supplement, distort, or even abandon the traditional computer-metaphor for the mind, but they are unwilling to give up the associated vocabulary, and they want to retain the basic questions that the computer-metaphor implied. This is just misguided: Yes, we have memory, but the idea that our having-memories works nigh identically to computer "memory" is wrong. Yes, we perceive, but the idea that our perceiving-the-world works nigh identically to computer "encoding" of "input" is wrong. More than a minor revision is needed.