Meeting of the Mind

The bleeding edge can be ragged and messy sometimes. Two ways to advance cognitive science have been taking fMRI images of brains doing various things, and brain-based education. The former is a popular activity almost everywhere, including at my university. How much has it turned up? Still not much detailing complex cognition—the whole brain lights up for a lot of tasks, or the phenomena studied are emotions. A promising area, though: social psychology of agreeableness, consensus, and collaboration (the opposite of conflict, which is, of course, a major topic of psychological study). See the work of Jared Kenworthy, for example. Now if we could only get them to study people’s agreement about concepts, instead of more primal urges.

Brain-based education still has a ways to go, too. A look through the databases suggests the idea ran out of steam by 2005.