Mind and Brain Sciences in the 21st Century.

Solso, R. L. (Ed.). (1997). Mind and brain sciences in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press (354 pp., $35 cloth, ISBN 0-262-19385-X).

As a century that witnessed great advances in mind sciences draws to a close, the need to address where we might be going in the next era is discussed in this book. The volume is a collection of intriguing and resourceful essays written by distinguished scholars in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. The editor, instead of forcing chapters to conform to a preconceived taxonomy, organized the book by three major categories which emerged from the submitted papers. Some chapters offer specific predictions about what the future may hold, while others discuss the scientific, philosophical, and social implications of the science of the mind.

The first part of the volume deals with an interesting topic to most of us, "Consciousness." The first essay "Psychology in a World of Sentient, Self-Knowing Beings" is written by Bernard Baars, who has spent much of his professional life studying consciousness. He urges that personal consciousness should be studied further in the coming century by treating personal experience like other psychological constructs such as memory and attention, and viewing consciousness as a variable, comparing matched instances of conscious and unconscious events.

In the essay" What Thin Partitions ...", the co-producer of the movie, Contact, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, discuss consciousness by examining behaviors of creatures such as ticks, moths, and human beings. The authors wonder if human consciousness is more than an exquisitely miniaturized computer; but they end the essay acknowledging that consciousness grew with increasing neuronal architecture and brain complexity. Richard Thompson describes the common view in neuroscience today in "Will the Mind Become the Brain in the 21st Century?" that the mind is an emergent property of the activity of the brain. Thompson predicts that the development of artificial minds that are equal or superior to the human mind and the increasing characterization of brain substrates of verbal and other aspects of behavior will help understand the mind.

Endel Tulving uses an imaginary visitor from the 21st century to tell us about C-Sci. "The First Axiom of Consciousness and Thought" accepted at the 2018 Telecongress--If a thing is not alive, it cannot be conscious, nor can it think--was revered throughout the 21st century. Although the prediction is rather dismal, the essay will make readers chuckle, while hinting at the complexity of the topic.

Part II, "Brain and Mind in the 21st Century," presents current and predicted developments of cognitive neuroscience for understanding the mind-brain relationship. In his essay "Infusing Cognitive Neuroscience into Cognitive Psychology," Edward Smith predicts increasing movement in cognitive psychology in the direction of neuroscience and the infusion of findings and ideas of cognitive neuroscience into cognitive psychology, in the next few decades. Smith predicts that neuroimaging techniques like PET and MRI may provide more informative and more directly interpretable information than could be obtained in strictly cognitive experiments.

Michael Posner and Daniel Levitin expect the maps of brain anatomy to yield greater detail and spatial resolution in "Imaging the Future." Their predictions of the future cognitive science include: The field of cognitive neuroscience will be likely to have a large impact on education including how school subjects are taught; and there is the promise of new excitement in the study of individual differences in cognition, emotion, and personality, as the methods such as neuroimaging and phenotypic approaches to defining personality are refined. Internationally known for engineering research in neuroelectric signal processing, Alan Gevin invents the Personal Brain Scanner (PBS) in his essay "What to Do with Your Own Personal Brain Scanner." Gevins's future PBS would perform mental checkups on you, help you improve basic mental functions like learning faster and enhance performance. Gevins claims that you will have your own PBS someday soon. I can't wait, but where would the "mind" fit in here?

Karl Pribram, the renowned brain scientist, discusses on "The Deep and Surface Structure of Memory and Conscious Learning: Toward a 21st-Century Model." Pribram presents speculative but historically well-grounded proposals to provoke 21st-century dialogue, research, and theorizing, by predicting a tension between mentalism and materialism which will lead to new directions in experimentation, observation, and mathematical theory construction. In "What Are Brains For?" Michael Gazzaniga contends that the question of what brains are for (sex that enhance reproductive success) is quite different from the question of what brains do. Gazzaniga predicts that the answers to how the brain generates complex capabilities might be discovered in informational terms, not in cellular or chemical terms.

In Part III "Psychology (Memory, Theory, and Cognition) in the 21st Century," readers will find it useful to see the summarized history of research written by leading authorities with backgrounds in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, experimental psychology, and/or psychosocial and psychophysiology. Henry Roediger makes predictions on "The Future of Cognitive Psychology." Among those are: The psychology of learning and memory will become (even more) interdisciplinary; neuroscientific approaches to learning and memory will become even more dominant; and some form of behaviorism will return and be reintroduced into psychology as a strong force to be reckoned with.

In her essay The Memory Trainers, Gay Snodgrass predicts that in the 21st century mental training will be an important adjunct to mental health. Through a speech on training the memory trainers delivered at a conference in the year 2050, Snodgrass captures the essence of memory research conducted in the past as the history behind the memory training techniques and memory test battery. Jerome Kagan also makes predictions "On Future Psychological Categories," which include the development of theoretically useful categories by adding biological features, past history, and multiple criteria to contemporary behavioral classification.

In "The Goal of Theory in Experimental Psychology," George Sperling suggests that theories in psychology are inherently incomplete or imprecise. He contends that psychologists can make a permanent contribution, by striving for simpler and more general theories at a given level of precision and complexity. Neal Miller attempts to show current students of psychology "How to Prepare for Our Future of Totally Unexpected Opportunities." He maintains that future psychologists should be educated for a lifetime of continued learning by having the basic understanding of the scientific method, learning to judge the quality of research, and being taught an understanding of the process by which basic research leads to new knowledge. With his knowledge and research experiences in vast areas of psychology, Hans Eysenck differentiates psychology as science and other doctrines such as psychoanalysis as quackery. Pointing out the growing impact of biological factors, Eysenck concludes that the future of psychology has the potential to make an importance contribution to social and individual well-being in the next century.

The last part consists of one essay "Mind Sciences and the 21st Century" by the editor of this book, Robert Solso. Solso who is also the editor of "The Science of the Mind" series, predicts that the future sciences will be influenced greatly by a fundamental change in the way scholarship will be performed as well as its application. The "Third Millennium Science" will usher in radical new techniques, operation modes, and communication networks, which will change the way we see ourselves and the universe, and have profound social and environmental impact.

The editor of the book did an excellent job of gathering quality essays from eminent authors in the field and organizing them in such way that readers can benefit from reading the chapters as sequenced. While the task given to the authors was to predict the future of mind and brain sciences in the 21st century, the authors wrote their predictions based on what research have found so far in their discipline, thus giving readers an opportunity to review the summaries of the past work. Although this book might be of interest to the professionals and students in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, the essays are written in a manner that except for one or two chapters, informed laypersons can understand them without the help of reference books on the topic.

The book helps make us aware that although understanding of the brain has advanced in the past century, at present no one seems to define adequately what the mind is. However, it also informs us that the field will advance with continuing efforts by these and future scientists. Readers, especially laypersons, will finish the book with a good idea of what the mind sciences have been doing in the past and where they might be going in the next century. It will be interesting to see how well the authors predicted the future of their field; some of us may still be around to see events unfold in the 21st century.

Reviewed by Eunsook Hong, Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a contributing editor of the Roeper Review.