Coaching with the Brain in Mind

CHAPTER 8

Pillar—Activating the Mind

The “cognitive revolution” is said to have begun in 1956. “Revolution” in the scientific world does not occur as the result of a popular uprising and fall of governments but something seemingly much tamer: the publication of books and articles and presentations at academic conferences. Jerome Bruner, Jackie Goodenough, and George Austin took on the decidedly unbehaviorist topic of cognitive strategies in their 1956 book, A Study of Thinking. George Miller published “The Magical Number Seven” (1956) as an exploration of the limitations of working memory. Other articles applied information and communications theory to psychological issues that had not been resolved by behaviorism and in so doing brought together developments in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, anthropology, and philosophy. It was in 1956 that the term “artificial intelligence” was used for the first time, as the topic of a conference of computer scientists at Dartmouth University.

This “revolution” had many precursors, some of which have been referred to in previous chapters. But Miller points to one specific day that, for him, marks the birth of cognitive psychology and cognitive science as an interdisciplinary effort: September 11, 1956. The Special Interest Group in Information Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had organized a symposium, with the first day devoted to coding theory. September 11 was the second day of the symposium, ...