Mazviita Chirimuuta

Yeah, so this is a chapter that I present in the book as a case study of how oversimplification can get scientists on the wrong track.

So the history of science is like hindsight 2020.

We're looking at a theory about how the brain worked, which was really dominant for a few decades at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century.

It's familiar to us today.

with Pavlov with this idea that we can explain behavior in terms of reflexes which get conditioned and there's obviously learning involved with that.

The most ambitious version of the theory said that all of the functions in the brain are basically versions of reflex arcs, so sensory motor loops.

So very prestigious and sort of well-regarded physiologists like Charles Sherrington was heavily invested in the reflex theory.

But he admitted in his book, The Integrated Action of the Nervous System, that this notion of a simple reflex is an idealization.

It probably doesn't exist in real life.

And yet this is the key that's going to kind of unlock neurophysiology.

It's going to help us decompose and make sense of all of these different things.

interactions that could be observed experimentally.

So what seemed to be going on there is that scientists were sort of taking that age old method, which is that it's a good heuristic to seek parsimonious explanations to use Occam's razor.

And the obvious thing to do was like, let's assume there's this thing that there's a simple reflex.

And then running with it way too far, actually never being able to explain the amount of data that they had initially thought that they would with it.

And it's not clear how long the reflex theory could have gone on for if it hadn't been for the computational theory coming in during the

Second World War era and basically providing an alternative explanatory framework which was also quite neat and I would say provides its own kind of idealization toolbox.

I think behaviourism is, it has a bad name, but it's not that discontinuous with a lot of thinking, which is sort of normal and still acceptable in science, which is to treat things as black boxes.

This is precisely what the behaviourist said.

It's like the mind is opaque.