Reasoning

The Neuroscience of How We Think

Daniel Krawczyk

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780128095768
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Neurociencia

Reasoning: The Neuroscience of How We Think is a comprehensive guide to the core topics related to a thorough understanding of reasoning. It presents the current knowledge of the subject in a unified, complete manner, ranging from animal studies, to applied situations, and is the only book available that presents a sustained focus on the neurobiological processes behind reasoning throughout all chapters, while also synthesizing research from animal behavior, cognitive psychology, development, and philosophy for a truly multidisciplinary approach. The book considers historical perspectives, state-of-the-art research methods, and future directions in emerging technology and cognitive enhancement.

Written by an expert in the field, this book provides a coherent and structured narrative appropriate for students in need of an introduction to the topic of reasoning as well as researchers seeking well-rounded foundational content. It is essential reading for neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, neuropsychologists and others interested in the neural mechanisms behind thinking, reasoning and higher cognition.

• Provides a comparative perspective considering animal cognition and its relevance to human reasoning
• Includes developmental and lifespan considerations throughout the book
• Discusses technological development and its role in reasoning, both currently and in the future
• Considers perspectives from not only neuroscience, but cognitive psychology, philosophy, development, and animal behavior for a multidisciplinary treatment
• Contains highlight boxes featuring additional details on methods, historical descriptions and experimental tasks

Chapter 1

Introduction to Reasoning

Abstract

Reasoning is a complex and multidisciplinary area of study. This book presents a series of overviews of an array of topics in the field. The book proceeds in a bottom-up manner by first introducing research on the brain and reasoning and working up toward social aspects of reasoning and the impacts of technology. Along the way we will cover many categories of reasoning and consider the implications of the nervous system, development, aging, and brain injury on reasoning. Reasoning involves some core features. Three important aspects of reasoning were discussed in this chapter. First, reasoning involves moving from multiple inputs to a single output, which can be a conclusion or an action. Second, reasoning involves multiple steps through a state space to achieve a final outcome. There are numerous ways through the process to achieve different outputs. Third, reasoning involves a mixture of previous knowledge and novel information. The precise combination of these types of information will vary based on the type of problem. The research community must take a broad view and incorporate many research methods to understand the process. It is also important that researchers propose clear operational definitions of the reasoning type that they are planning to study.

Keywords

Cognition; Development; Induction; Neuroscience deduction; Philosophy; Psychology; Reasoning

Outline

Introduction to Reasoning

About This Book

Features of the Book

Defining Reasoning

What Counts as “Reasoning”?

Factors That Influence Reasoning

How We Study Reasoning

Historical Considerations

A Multidisciplinary Approach

Categorizing Reasoning

Defining Diverse Modes of Thinking

Determining Cause and Effect

Reasoning About Rules

Inductive Inferences

Reasoning and Decision Making

Putting It All Together

Reasoning in Society

What Does the Future Hold?

Summary

End-of-Chapter Thought Questions

References

Key Themes

• The study of reasoning is a multidisciplinary area involving researchers in neuroscience, psychology, economics, computer science, philosophy, and business.

• Reasoning involves moving from multiple inputs to a single output, which can be a conclusion or an action.

• Reasoning involves multiple steps through a state space to achieve a final outcome. There are numerous ways through the process to achieve different conclusions.

• Reasoning involves a mixture of previous knowledge and novel information.

• Reasoning capability is determined by our cognitive operations. It depends upon attention, working memory, and long-term memory.

• Reasoning is determined by the capabilities of an organism’s nervous system. Species with complex brains tend to show greater levels of complexity in reasoning and behavior.

• There are several different categories of reasoning, and these are defined by the complexity of the inputs, the particular operations that occur, and the types of conclusions that can be reached.

• Technological advances have opened up a variety of exciting new avenues in reasoning research including augmenting human reasoning.

Introduction to Reasoning

About This Book

The field of reasoning has a long and diverse history. There was a time when scholars believed that the mind and body were largely separate and that the functions of the mind were somehow unique, possibly defying the laws of nature. This led thinkers to use their own imaginations in order to create theories about how we reason. They did this using those powers of reasoning to construct theories and myths about the operations of the world around them. Over time people began to notice links between the natural world and human behavior. In our not so distant past, a wealth of new measures emerged and it became clear that the body and mind were intimately linked. Brain research flourished, and people began to construct biological theories about the mind and test them using scientific methods. At this time the scholars applied a new set of interesting tools to help try to make sense of our remarkable brains. Today we have a wide array of incredible tools with which to investigate our thinking and reasoning processes. We do so in the context of both biology and psychology. This book describes many of the breakthroughs that have led to our current thinking on the topic of reasoning in relation to the mind and brain.

Writing a book is a vast undertaking, and this may be particularly true about a book on reasoning. There are still many unknowns in this field. We do not fully understand how different cognitive processes are defined at the level of the brain. We do not yet have methods that allow us to record from large enough populations of neurons across the brain. We cannot yet read neural codes to understand what areas of the brain are actually signaling to one another when information is relayed across the cortex. We do not yet have a strong enough grasp on which cognitive processes are involved in which types of reasoning. Added to these challenges is the fact that reasoning occurs in a dynamic way. Thoughts occur to us seemingly out of the blue. We connect ideas together because we notice events occurring in a particular order. We make errors in our inference and quickly correct them. When we gain expertise in an area, we have a difficult time describing to a novice how we are accomplishing our plans in what appears to be a remarkably fast and efficient way to the beginner. Due to these challenges and limitations the field remains quite diverse. There is always more research to be done.

The challenges in studying reasoning may stem from the fact that we are ultimately limited by our own reasoning processes in how we study the topic. Reasoning emerges out of a remarkably complex series of events that we can only glimpse at with the current technology. The brain is a classic example of a complex system, and reasoning must be examined from a certain point of view or level of analysis. We cannot hope to understand it from a purely top-down perspective, using our own introspection to look inward upon our thought processes. Likewise, we cannot view it from a purely bottom-up perspective by examining the biochemistry of the brain and attempting to grasp our thinking at the level of neurochemical activity. Understanding reasoning requires a balanced viewpoint. We must take a top-down approach to define a limited aspect of cognitive processing constrained to certain circumstances and combine this with a bottom-up view that is informed by our growing knowledge of neuroscience. Because our top-down definitions can be imprecise and there remain many gaps in our understanding of the brain, there are no easy answers in this field.

This book will walk you through some of the major steps on the journey toward understanding thinking, reasoning, and decision making. We will examine these topics from a series of different perspectives. Together, the chapters add up to inform the reader about the current state of the field, how we got to where we are now, and possibly where we are going as new methods develop and technological capabilities begin to approach human levels of capacity on certain tasks.

Features of the Book

Each chapter features research that is organized around a core topic. The topic serves as an anchor point or general domain, but remember that this is all about thinking and reasoning. Due to the sheer diversity of research that makes up this fascinating field, there is a rather wide distribution of research topics and themes in each chapter. Rather than focus on every topic and provide a very detailed and complete description of that specific area, the chapters emphasize providing an overview, or survey, of several aspects of each topic. I will freely admit that no book on this topic can hope to offer a complete guide to reasoning. There is simply too much research in too many disciplines in this field to achieve such a goal. Therefore, I offer you, the reader, a flavor of some of the important research in each area and invite you to dig deeper and search the relevant literature in the areas that you find captivating.

The book is organized in a bottom-up manner. We will begin with basic definitions of reasoning presented in this chapter. From there we will proceed to examine reasoning from a historical perspective in Chapter 2. I felt this was important to set the stage and offer context to the topics that come later. To appreciate the research in this field, one has to have a sense of its context, what was going on during different time periods, and why certain conclusions were drawn. We then move to an introduction to the study of reasoning from the perspective of neuroscience. This chapter offers the reader a sense of the growing body of work connecting the mind to the brain. This chapter may be easier to follow if you have had a course in an area of neuroscience, but I have not assumed an extensive neuroscience background and have constructed it in a way that should make sense to a diverse audience. Our reasoning and thought processes are shaped by our nervous system and the experiences we have had in life. Having a grasp of the types of neuroscience research currently available will help the reader to follow much of the content in the later chapters, all of which include some elements of neuroscience. Chapter 4 examines the fascinating field of animal reasoning research. From there, we move through the lifespan in Chapters 5 and 6 beginning with reasoning in young children, moving through adolescence, and lastly examining reasoning in older adults. Chapter 7 complements the previous three chapters by discussing the impact of neurological and psychiatric disorders on reasoning. Chapter 7 includes extensive information about the brain and many disorders that impact people throughout the lifespan. Chapters 8–11 discuss different categories of reasoning, such as deduction, induction, reasoning about contingencies and causes, analogical reasoning, and how we make decisions. The final chapters take a broader view examining how we reason within the context of society and the impact of technology on reasoning.

Throughout the book I invite the reader to identify consistencies and areas of overlap among the topics presented. The discipline of reasoning has blurry edges. Research does not always fit neatly under one part...