Brian Bruya (born 22 December 1966) is a professor of philosophy at Eastern Michigan University, [1] and an author of books and articles in the fields of comparative philosophy, cognitive science, and educational psychology. [2] [3] Bruya is known for his work in the study of "effortless attention", [4] [5] and showing that it is possible to foster wisdom in a formal educational setting. [6] He is also a translator [7] and has published translations of a number of popular comic books on Chinese philosophy, which have been featured in The New York Times . [8]
Bruya earned a B. A. (Philosophy; Chinese Language & Literature) from the University of Washington in 1992. He went on to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, earning an M. A. (Philosophy) in 1999 and Ph.D. (Philosophy) in 2004.
Bruya discovered that although the topic of effortless attention had been a topic of research in behavioral psychology for several decades, it had been neglected in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. [9] Bruya attributed that neglect to the dominant attention paradigm introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his 1972 book Attention and Effort, in which Kahneman equates attention with effort, thereby precluding the theoretic possibility of effortless attention. Bruya's book Effortless Attention [10] was the first attempt to apply the methods of cognitive neuroscience to the topic of effortless attention. That work has since been followed up by a number of research programs, including Corinna Peifer and Stefan Engeser's Advances in Flow Research. [11] The term "effortless attention" was subsequently introduced into the American Psychological Association's Dictionary of Psychology. [4] Bruya and Yi-Yuan Tang's 2018 article "Is Attention Really Effort?" marshals empirical evidence to refute Kahneman's position. [12]
Bruya and sociologist Monika Ardelt surmised that wisdom could be treated as a character strength (which is open to short-term modification) rather than the usual way of treating it as a personality trait (which is not open to short-term modification). [13] Using Ardelt's 3-D Wisdom scale, [14] Bruya and Ardelt measured students' wisdom at the beginning and end of the semester, and found that student wisdom could be made to increase over the course of a semester. [13] This was the first time that scientists had demonstrated that wisdom could be taught in a formal education setting. [13]
Bruya says that his theory of effortless attention derives from his research in early Chinese, especially Daoist, theories of spontaneous (self-caused) human action. [15] He posits that whereas traditional European theories of action separate the human being from nature, early Chinese theories view the human being as fundamentally natural. [16] Noticing that in European theories the Latin term sponte (and its European language derivatives) sometimes harbors mutually contradictory meanings (spontaneous as free and spontaneous as determined), he coined the term "paradox of spontaneity" to describe the philosophical problem, and noted that European philosophers consistently appealed to the concept of God to resolve the paradox. [16] Bruya suggests that the Chinese tradition avoided the paradox by never drawing the free vs. determined distinction and were able to theorize human spontaneity without reference to God. [16] Bruya has applied the Chinese idea of spontaneous (self-caused) human action to philosophy of action, cognitive neuroscience, and aesthetics (especially with respect to a theory of improvisation). [15]
Bruya is an outspoken critic of the lack of Asian philosophy in American Philosophy Ph.D. programs. In a series of articles, he claims both structural problems and problems that could stem from ethnocentrism prevent Ph.D. programs from integrating Asian philosophical traditions into existing programs. [17] [18] [19]
Bruya is the translator of C. C Tsai's critically acclaimed comic book adaptations of Chinese philosophical classics, such as the Zhuangzi, the Dao De Jing, the Analects of Confucius, and Sunzi's Art of War. [20] In addition to academic articles on art history and philosophy, he also translated (with co-translator Ma Aiju 马爱菊) Zhao Pu's 赵普 Simple Treasures 掇珍集, a collection of personal essays on uses of traditional art in China today. [21]
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
The problem of other minds is a philosophical problem traditionally stated as the following epistemological question: Given that I can only observe the behavior of others, how can I know that others have minds? The problem is that knowledge of other minds is always indirect. The problem of other minds does not negatively impact social interactions due to people having a "theory of mind" – the ability to spontaneously infer the mental states of others – supported by innate mirror neurons, a theory of mind mechanism, or a tacit theory. There has also been an increase in evidence that behavior results from cognition which in turn requires consciousness and the brain.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
A heuristic (; from Ancient Greek εὑρίσκω 'method of discovery', or heuristic technique is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless "good enough" as an approximation or attribute substitution. Where finding an optimal solution is impossible or impractical, heuristic methods can be used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Heuristics can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision.
Heuristic reasoning is often based on induction, or on analogy[.] [...] Induction is the process of discovering general laws [...] Induction tries to find regularity and coherence [...] Its most conspicuous instruments are generalization, specialization, analogy. [...] Heuristic discusses human behavior in the face of problems [...that have been] preserved in the wisdom of proverbs.
Bounded rationality is the idea that rationality is limited when individuals make decisions, and under these limitations, rational individuals will select a decision that is satisfactory rather than optimal.
Daniel Kahneman was an Israeli-American cognitive scientist best-known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. He is also known for his work in behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences together with Vernon L. Smith. Kahneman's published empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory. Kahneman became known as the "grandfather of behavioral economics."
Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC), synthetic consciousness or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience. The same terminology can be used with the term "sentience" instead of "consciousness" when specifically designating phenomenal consciousness.
Philosophy of psychology is concerned with the history and foundations of psychology. It deals with both epistemological and ontological issues and shares interests with other fields, including philosophy of mind and theoretical psychology. Philosophical and theoretical psychology are intimately tied and are therefore sometimes used interchangeably or used together. However, philosophy of psychology relies more on debates general to philosophy and on philosophical methods, whereas theoretical psychology draws on multiple areas.
Flow in positive psychology, also known colloquially as being inthe zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration. Flow is used as a coping skill for stress and anxiety when productively pursuing a form of leisure that matches one's skill set.
Phronesis is a type of wisdom or intelligence concerned with practical action. It implies both good judgment and excellence of character and habits, and was a common topic of discussion in ancient Greek philosophy. Classical works about this topic are still influential today. In Aristotelian ethics, the concept was distinguished from other words for wisdom and intellectual virtues—such as episteme and sophia—because of its practical character. The traditional Latin translation is prudentia, which is the source of the English word "prudence".
Anne Marie Treisman was an English psychologist who specialised in cognitive psychology.
Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions. This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a philosophical methodology that relies mainly on a priori justification, sometimes called "armchair" philosophy, by experimental philosophers. Experimental philosophy initially began by focusing on philosophical questions related to intentional action, the putative conflict between free will and determinism, and causal vs. descriptive theories of linguistic reference. However, experimental philosophy has continued to expand to new areas of research.
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It was vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others.
Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.
Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012–2018). Since 2014 he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS (Paris); École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University. He is also known for his philosophical notes on the effects of solitary confinement.
In psychology, the human mind is considered to be a cognitive miser due to the tendency of humans to think and solve problems in simpler and less effortful ways rather than in more sophisticated and effortful ways, regardless of intelligence. Just as a miser seeks to avoid spending money, the human mind often seeks to avoid spending cognitive effort. The cognitive miser theory is an umbrella theory of cognition that brings together previous research on heuristics and attributional biases to explain when and why people are cognitive misers.
Attribute substitution is a psychological process thought to underlie a number of cognitive biases and perceptual illusions. It occurs when an individual has to make a judgment that is computationally complex, and instead substitutes a more easily calculated heuristic attribute. This substitution is thought of as taking place in the automatic intuitive judgment system, rather than the more self-aware reflective system. Hence, when someone tries to answer a difficult question, they may actually answer a related but different question, without realizing that a substitution has taken place. This explains why individuals can be unaware of their own biases, and why biases persist even when the subject is made aware of them. It also explains why human judgments often fail to show regression toward the mean.
Thinking, Fast and Slow is a 2011 popular science book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The book's main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical.
Automatic and controlled processes (ACP) are the two categories of cognitive processing. All cognitive processes fall into one or both of those two categories. The amounts of "processing power", attention, and effort a process requires is the primary factor used to determine whether it's a controlled or an automatic process. An automatic process is capable of occurring without the need for attention, and the awareness of the initiation or operation of the process, and without drawing upon general processing resources or interfering with other concurrent thought processes. Put simply, an automatic process is unintentional, involuntary, effortless, and occurring outside awareness. Controlled processes are defined as a process that is under the flexible, intentional control of the individual, that the individual is consciously aware of, and that are effortful and constrained by the amount of attentional resources available at the moment.