About

As the mind-brain problem becomes less enigmatic due to advancements in neurobiology and cognitive psychology, library science has become more knowledgeable about how information is stored, retrieved, and perceived. Yet neuropsychology, which could provide the “hard science” basis for library science, measures tasks too simple to answer the questions information managers face: how do humans organize and understand complex concepts? What predisposes scholars to form communities? How good a representation is a particular abstract? And librarians are far from asking what is the physiological basis of their patrons’ choices.

Now that library and information researchers study how people collaborate and build knowledge bases that are more than the sum of their parts, what goes on in participants’ brains? Can collaborative work (or the computer systems supporting or emulating it) be based on a neuropsychological model?

This blog is a collection of feeds and articles that come to the author’s attention, which monitors how closely the two disciplines (neuroscience and library/information science) approach each other. The hope is that if the two are stirred together, there will be a useful synthesis.

The author is an information manager (and sometime information scientist) whose curiosity was aroused by his own brain injury—lost abilities correlated with locations of traumatic lesions in the cerebral cortex. He is grateful for the great strides in biomedical science which enabled him to survive, and encouraged by the new possibilities in measurement of information behavior.