Emory psychologists to build new connections in Science Commons

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Profiles

Lawrence Barsalou, Cognitive Psychology

Lawrence Barsalou (Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology) has spent more than thirty years thinking about how the brain produces thoughts.

When he first began his research in the mid-1970s, he shared the view of his fellow cognitive psychologists who theorized that the mind accessed knowledge in much the same way as a computer.

In the last decade, however, with advances in brain imaging, he's now able to peer inside people's heads to see what is happening when a person either thinks or looks at, say, a chair. It seems that neurons located in the visual and motor systems are turned on and driven into a certain level of activation, which creates the experience of seeing a chair.

And when a person thinks about a chair in its absence, the brain runs the visual system in a way that resembles how the system would be running if the person were looking at an actual chair.

So instead of knowledge being manipulated within a computer-like brain, the mind actually recreates states of seeing and touching when engaged in knowledge, perception, memory, language and thought.

His past achievements in the field, as well as his exceptional promise, earned Barsalou a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002.

He says that his early experiences in meditation has helped drive his research interests. “What I really liked about cognitive psychology is that it is not just a casual, subjective way of finding out how the mind works. You actually can design rigorous scientific experiments to verify what the mind is doing.”

Barsalou Homepage:
http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/barsalou/