The Mental Trilogy

The Mental Trilogy

Throughout much of history, the mind has been viewed as a trilogy, a tripartite amalgam that includes cognition, emotion, and motivation. For some, the trilogy was a description of different aspects of a single mental faculty, whereas for others, it represented three distinct, separate capacities. During most of the twentieth century. Both versions of the mental trilogy were out of favor. When the behaviorists reigned, psychology ignored the mind altogether, making the mental trilogy moot.

Later, the cognitive revolution brought the mind back to psychology, but thinking and related cognitive processes were (and for the most part still are) emphasized at the expense of emotion and motivation. Clearly, however, it is important to understand not just how we attend to, remember, or reason, but also why we attend to, remember or reason about some things rather than others. Thinking cannot be fully comprehended if emotions and motivations are ignored.

Mental Juggling

An idea, an image, a sensation, a feeling: each is an example of what psychologists call mental content – stuff that is in the mind. Mental content was the subject matter of experimental psychology when it first emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century. But John Watson and fellow behaviorists replaced this focus on subjective states with a mind-less psychology of objectively measurable events (stimuli and responses). When the cognitive revolution later made the mind fair game again, it did not do so by reviving subjective psychology. The thinking process itself, rather than the conscious content that results from thinking, became, and largely remains, the subject matter of cognitive science.

Working memory is our inherent capacity to think. Photo by Elena.

“In order for a mind to think, it has to juggle fragments of its mental states.” This simple statement by Marvin Minsky, one of the architects of the branch of cognitive science known as artificial intelligence, gets right to the heart of the matter. Imagine, as Minsky suggests, rearranging the furniture in a room familiar to you. You shift your attention back and forth between locations. Different ideas and images come into focus, and some interrupt others. You compare and contrast alternate arrangements. You may concentrate your entire mind on a small detail one moment, and on the whole room the next. How does the mind do this juggling, and how does it keep track of the imaginary changes? The answer is that the mind uses something called working memory.

How many times have you looked up a phone number and then forgotten it after being momentarily distracted? The reason for this is that you put the number into working memory, a mental workshop that accommodates one task at a time. As soon as a new task engages working memory, the content of the old task in bumped out. For that reason, unless you keep rehearsing the phone number and manage to ignore other things that compete for your attention, it will not remain in your mind.

Working memory is one of the brain's most sophisticated capacities and is involved in all aspects of thinking and problem-solving. It allows you to read a menu and keep its various options in mind while also considering the specials announced by the waiter and the return to the thought you were having before the waiter appeared. It underlies your ability to hold a conversation, play board games like chess, or direct yourself to an unfamiliar destination on the basis of having just looked at a map. In addition to being used in such routine daily activities, working memory also contributes to special human endeavors, like composing music or solving complex mathematical problems, or any other situation in which information has to be held in mind in order to complete a task.

We must explore broad aspects of mental function, that is, to begin to assemble a neurobiological view of the self. Illustration by Elena.

Synaptic Self. How Our Brains Become Who We Are. By Joseph LeDoux (author of The Emotional Brain).