Why the URL and Blog Name

I know that this will come up eventually so I thought that it would be a good idea to write something about it. I chose themindsnewsciece.blogspot.com as my url and the cognitive revolution as the title to my blog for particular reasons.

The short answer is that Minds New Science is a book by Howard Gardner (the multiple intelligence guy) that chronicles the cognitive revolution. The Minds New Science had a dramatic effect on me and my interest in psychology as did the cognitive psychology course that I read it for. So I am giving a nod to cognitive psychology and that book. Lastly, I think that the cognitive revolution makes a cool title for a blog especially since I like to think that I occasionally have new and interesting things to say.

I suppose that you are wondering why I like cognitive psychology so much; well, the answer is simple. Before the cognitive revolution mainstream psychology was basically two fields. There was behaviorism which is hardcore experimental and comparative psychology. Then there was the personality/social theory stuff like Freud which I often call soft psychology because of its emphasis on theory rather than experimentation. When I took cognitive psychology, it was the first time that I saw psychology as something that had an independent body of knowledge that was based on experiments conducted with human participants. Behaviorists spent their time. torturing rats and monkeys to make judgments about human behavior while soft psychologist made stuff up.

Finally, while I/O, human factors, and areas like neuroscience and psychophysics have been around for a long time, they are not what I would call mainstream disciplines in psychology. I/O and human factors don’t have chapters in most intro books and are hardly mentioned in schools that don’t have faculty members of either specialty. In addition, most departments have positions for social, cognitive, and clinical psychologists and not I/O or human factors. Psychophysics and neuroscience are/were often conducted by people who have no real affiliation with psychology. They are/were M.D.s and physicist who happened to make some discoveries that pertained to psychology. There for a time, I thought that the way to be a good experimental psychologist was to study something other than psychology, and then to later make the switch.