In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind

by Eric R. Kandel

The thinking of cognitive psychologists was driven by two underlying assumptions. The first was the Kantian notion that the brain is born with a priori knowledge, “knowledge that is…independent of experience.” That idea was later advanced by the European school of Gestalt psychologists, the forerunners, together with psychoanalysis, of modern cognitive psychology. The Gestalt psychologists argued that our coherent perceptions are the end result of the brain’s built-in ability to derive meaning from the properties of the world, only limited features of which can be detected by the peripheral sensory organs. The reason that the brain can derive meaning from, say, a limited analysis of a visual scene is that the visual system does not simply record a scene passively, as a camera does. Rather, perception is creative: the visual system transforms the two-dimensional patterns of light on the retina of the eye into a logically coherent and stable interpretation of a three-dimensional sensory world. Built into neural pathways of the brain are complex rules of guessing; those rules allow the brain to extract information from relatively impoverished patterns of incoming neural signals and turn it into a meaningful image. The brain is thus the ambiguity-resolving machine par excellence!