Human Cognition (Paperback) | Released: 27 Feb 2011

HUMAN COGNITION is organised as a four-part, sixteen session, graduate program on human higher brain function. > The Cognitive System Theory introduced here provides the first fully scientific model of how the hominid brain works, and explains how its two masterstrokes of cognitive development are achieved for each and every one of us in childhood. It explains how the mind originates and develops its power, on the way resolving the 'duality' problem. It explains how cognition is modularly structured and how this system is case-managed under endogenous control. It introduces fresh ideas about perspective in knowledge representation. It identifies consciousness in its various aspects with cognitive control, and an elegant matrix representation of its interacting control elements reveals the stereotypical transitions in control morphology which characterise child development. The origin of endogenous sequence-management skills is explained, as is the acquisition from within subective experience of an objectified self-model, contingent and peculiar to the bipedal hominid. >Part 1 begins with the mind. A competence won out of hesitancy to commit to action in a cognitive field of play. Consuming energy for cognitive work directed by an independent axis of control which is representation dependent. Mind-brain 'duality' resolves into cognitive progress and cognitive control dimensions, the latter identified with consciousness. >Part 2 continues with cognition and consciousness integrated into a control model of human cognition. This subsumes incoherent neuronal activity and generates our coherent experience of it. Two dimensions of control characterise its model of learning. The first orients internally to activity 'templates' subtended in four late-developing association areas of the brain. The second switches between attentional modes--the default mammalian 'spotlight', another developed through language for sequence-management, the ultimate developed through the self-model's choice-making for vector targeting skill. >Part 3 explores the implications of an autonomous, information-hiding, cognitive system for representational cognitive content as it is stored and refined in the brain. It embeds dimensionalised perspectives won from experience, satisfices its commitments to storage, and relies upon an intrinsically gated protocol of intermittent bursts of cognitive coherence. A new understanding of knowledge as it is held naturally in the brain totally refreshes our ideas of concept-formation, our fundamental need of them, and their practical use. >Part 4 investigates the changing morphology of consciousness. A specification is developed incorporating ten 'intensive' quality control elements and ten 'extensive' performance control elements. These drive and shape the autonomous cognitive system model. Three successive cognitive phases emerge in development from the matrix of their interactions. Consciousness steers us through phase-changes in cognitive representation as cognitive mastery is acquired via the self-model.
About the Author: Peter Burton has honorary positions in Quality of Life & Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University in Canberra ACT, and at Illawarra Health & Medical Research Institute at the University of Wollongong. >Peter is an independent research analyst with experience in science (molecular physics and quantum chemistry) and finance (equity analysis and risk appraisal). For a decade, he has committed to re-investigate human higher brain function with the aim of understanding the science of human consciousness. Five analytical monographs (on learning; experience; consciousness; knowledge; and the self-model) provide the organised infrastructure for this work, a unified, encompassing and penetrating model of the system of human cognition. >The human Cognitive System Theory he develops here from first principles emerges as powerfully explanatory of the mind-brain problem, the elusive nature of consciousness, and the acquisition of the objective self-model from within subjective experience. It succeeds to explain how our intelligence emerges systematically from our experience, specifically and perhaps counter-intuitively, from conserving the energy invested in decision-making. >Peter studied at Monash University to earn his PhD in theoretical chemistry and began his research career studying precise models of electronic structure and the nature of weak molecular interactions, an enduring interest. Computational skills and experience in education drew his attention towards cognitive science in the mid 1980s, beginning with a major survey of the field, published in the journal Psychobiology in 1990. He waited out the US 'Decade of the Brain' and the establishment of the Japanese 'Human Frontiers' project on the brain by engaging as an analyst with Credit Suisse and his own business in the finance industry. By 2000, he felt that another, deeper, review of human consciousness was still required. >Bringing his diverse scientific and analytic skills to bear, and taking a disciplined strategic approach to its analysis and exposition, he has drilled the subject matter segmented 'at its joints' in order to expose previously unseen connections, invalid assumptions and blinkered thought. >The result of a decade's persistence, HUMAN COGNITION emerges out of left field to illuminate and elucidate the major scientific questions outstanding about the nature of the human condition (cognition) and what it means to be human (consciousness): the mind engaged in the brain.