Terry McDermott stopped by Warwick's Books in La Jolla, California to present his new book 101 Theory Drive, a fascinating study of neuroscientist Gary Lynch. For more information about this and other events please visit www.warwicks.com.
Bio
Terry McDermott
Terry McDermott, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, was skeptical of the way the Sept. 11 hijackers were portrayed. So he traveled to 22 countries to research their identities, motives and life circumstances.
He found that they weren't deeply disturbed. They came from intact families, most were middle-class, few were deeply religious, and none were abused or estranged. His new book is Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why They Did It.
Interdisciplinary study that attempts to explain the cognitive processes of humans and some higher animals in terms of the manipulation of symbols using computational rules. The field draws particularly on the disciplines of artificial intelligence, psychology (seecognitive psychology), linguistics, neuroscience, and philosophy. Some chief areas of research in cognitive science have been vision, thinking and reasoning, memory, attention, learning, and language processing. Early theories of cognitive function attempted to explain the evident compositionality of human thought (thoughts are built up of smaller units put together in a certain way), as well as its productivity (the process of putting together a thought from smaller units can be repeated indefinitely to produce an infinite number of new thoughts), by assuming the existence of discrete mental representations that can be put together or taken apart according to rules that are sensitive to the representations' syntactic, or structural, properties. This language of thought hypothesis was later challenged by an approach, variously referred to as connectionism, parallel-distributed processing, or neural-network modeling, according to which cognitive processes (such as pattern recognition) consist of adjustments in the activation strengths of neuronlike processing units arranged in a network.