Not long ago, I was sii\tting with a friend in front of a tasty plate of lo mein noodles, and our conversation turned to-what else?--the nature of psychology as we know it. Today's experimental psychology is built on a spaghetti model of the mind.
I am thinking of the independent-variable-dependent-variable procedure at the core of most psychology experiments. That is, the experimenter defines a certain independent variable, say, a work of fiction. Then he or she prunes away all the confounds so that the experiment will focus on one carefully defined stimulus. Then the experimenter varies the stimulus,and finds a response also carefully defined that co-varies with the stimulus, and that co-variance of correlation becomes the basis for the article to be published.
It is just like pulling on one strand of spaghetti in a bowl of spaghetti and finding an end of the strand that moves, the end presumably of the spaghetti you pulled, a wiggling end that can be isolated from the bowl as a whole.
Experimentation proceeds this way, tugging on one independent-variable--dependent-variable strand of spaghetti after another. The mind becomes, in effect, a whole bowl of spaghetti, a collection of single-strand correlations between singled-out stimuli and the single responses connected to them. Each correlation is like one strand of spaghetti, and the mind as a whole is one big bowl of strands of spaghetti.
The spaghetti model of mind
Alack and alas, this spaghetti model has little to do with the way the brain is constructed: billlions of neurons with thousands of connections one to another plus glial cells that contribute--we are not yet sure how--to the processing of information.
Now you might counter that a plate of spaghetti models the mind and not the brain. But that's not a very satisfactory answer. Surely the structure of mind must somehow reflect the structure of brain, although, granted, we don't know how. And does mind, as we experience it in everyday life, feel like a bowl of spaghetti? Do we have one stimulus, proximal, pulling out one response, distal? Not in my mind, you don't.
Indeed, it is this model that is turning psychology, for all its clams to be a science, into one of the humanities. (I pointed this out in an earlier blog, May 14, 2009.), Briefly, each experiment defines its independent and dependent variables in unique ways and adds a unique methodology. The result is a collection of discrete experimental results, each of which is thoroughly scientific, but that, as a whole, do not cumulate in the manner of a science. Rather the collection of experiments maintains a continuing conversation in the manner of the humanities. Or like a discussion over a plate of lo mein.
