NEW ORLEANS (RPT) – At the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, a cognitive psychologist claimed that, despite decades of theoretical opposition to the possibility in her field, the mind and the brain might actually be connected.
“I am not trying to re-write history, but I have quite compelling data suggesting that cognition is correlated with activity in the brain,” she explained in her talk. The psychologist presented a number of images showing what was presumably activity in the brain while participants were completing cognitive tasks. “We still don’t know a lot about the direction of the relationship between these two processes, but we now have the technology to figure it out,” she said.
A psychologist not involved in the study was asked to comment on the radical claim that the mind and brain are connected. “It is total bullshit,” he said, “everyone knows that the brain is a physical organ in your skull and that the mind is what you think with.” Other opponents of this theory pointed out that the researcher’s hypothesis was not pre-registered, which raises questions about the validity of the findings.
