Bio
David Presti Ph.D.
David Presti is a neurobiologist and cognitive scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, where he has taught in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for more than twenty years. For more than a decade (1990-2000) he also worked in the treatment of addiction and of post-traumatic-stress disorder (PTSD) at the Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center in San Francisco. His areas of expertise include the chemistry of the human nervous system, the effects of drugs on the brain and the mind, the treatment of addiction, and the scientific study of the mind and consciousness.
He has doctorates in molecular biology and biophysics from the California Institute of Technology and in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon. Since 2004, he has also been teaching neuroscience to Tibetan monks in India, in a program inspired by the Dalai Lama. His primary research interest is the relation between mentality, consciousness, and brain physiology, the so-called mind-body problem.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- cognitive science
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 (see cognitive 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.
- cognitive science on britannica.com
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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