Res Extensa And Res Cogitans: A Kind Of Mental Structure - Essay Example

Res Extensa And Res Cogitans: A Kind Of Mental StructureIntroduction Efforts to understand the mind and its process go back at least to the Ancient Greeks, when philosophers like Plato and Aristotle tried to explain the nature of human understanding. In the 17th century, Descartes popularized the view that the body and the mind were two divided entities, identified as Res Extensa and Res Cogitans. The word "cognitive" in "cognitive science" is "used for any kind of mental operation or structure that can be studied in precise terms" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999)1.

Attention William James, in his colossal Principles of Psychology (1890), remarked:"Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness is of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction and Zerstreutheit in German.

" 2 Attention is the cognitive practice of selectively concentrating on one facet of the environment while ignoring others. It is the selection of significant information. The human mind is assailed with millions of stimulus and it must decide which of this information to process. Attention is at times seen as a spotlight, implying one can only shine the light on a definite set of information. Experiments supporting this metaphor consist of the dichotic listening task (Cherry, 19573) and studies of inattention blindness (Mack and Rock, 19984).

In the dichotic listening task, subjects are assailed with two separate messages, one in each ear, and asked to focus on only one. At the conclusion of the experiment, when asked about the gist of the unattended message, subjects could not report it. Like listening carefully to what someone is saying while disregarding other conversations in the room (the cocktail party effect5) or attending to a cell phone conversation while driving. Sometimes attention shifts to matters unrelated to the external environment, a phenomenon referred to as mind-wandering or "spontaneous thought".

Attention may be distinguished according to its condition as 'overt' versus 'covert'. Overt attention is the process of directing sense organs towards a stimulus. Covert attention is the process of mentally focusing on one of numerous possible sensory stimuli. Covert attention is considered to be a neural process that boosts the signal from a particular branch of the sensory panorama. Conclusion Attention remains a key area of research within psychology and neuroscience. Many of the major questions of James' time remain unanswered.

For example, even though most scientists admit that attention can be split, strong proof has remained hard to pin down. And there is still no broadly accepted definition of attention more tangible than that given by James. This lack of progress has led many observers to speculate that attention refers to many separate processes without a common mechanism.Reference:1 Lakoff, G and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy In The Flesh. New York: Basic Books.2 James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology.

New York: Henry Holt, Vol. 1, pp. 403-404.3 Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of speech, with one and two ears. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 25, pp. 975–979.4 Mack and Rock, 19985 Strayer, D. L., Drews, F. A. & Johnston, W. A. (2003). Cell phone induced failures of visual attention during simulated driving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 9, 23-32.