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 perception, memory, attention, reasoning, language, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making 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."
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
Alice Miller was a Polish-Swiss psychologist, psychoanalyst and philosopher of Jewish origin, who is noted for her books on parental child abuse, translated into several languages. She was also a noted public intellectual.
Daniel Goleman is an American psychologist, author, and science journalist. For twelve years, he wrote for The New York Times, reporting on the brain and behavioral sciences. His 1995 book Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times Best Seller list for a year and a half, a bestseller in many countries, and is in print worldwide in 40 languages. Apart from his books on emotional intelligence, Goleman has written books on topics including self-deception, creativity, transparency, meditation, social and emotional learning, ecoliteracy and the ecological crisis, and the Dalai Lama's vision for the future.
Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's soul. Introspection is closely related to human self-reflection and self-discovery and is contrasted with external observation.
Arthur Owen Barfield was an English philosopher, author, poet, critic, and member of the Inklings.
The health of Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945, has long been a subject of popular controversy. Both his physical and mental health have come under scrutiny.
Fred Alan Wolf is an American theoretical physicist specializing in quantum physics and the relationship between physics and consciousness. He is a former physics professor at San Diego State University, and has helped to popularize science on the Discovery Channel. He is the author of a number of physics-themed books including Taking the Quantum Leap (1981), The Dreaming Universe (1994), Mind into Matter (2000), and Time Loops and Space Twists (2011).
Modal realism is the view propounded by philosopher David Lewis that all possible worlds are real in the same way as is the actual world: they are "of a kind with this world of ours." It is based on four tenets: possible worlds exist, possible worlds are not different in kind from the actual world, possible worlds are irreducible entities, and the term actual in actual world is indexical, i.e. any subject can declare their world to be the actual one, much as they label the place they are "here" and the time they are "now".
Geoffrey Franklin Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist, author, and associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. He is known for his research on sexual selection in human evolution.
Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is a psychologist and primatologist most known for her work with two bonobos, Kanzi and Panbanisha, investigating their linguistic and cognitive abilities using lexigrams and computer-based keyboards. Originally based at Georgia State University's Language Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, she worked at the Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary in Des Moines, Iowa from 2006 until her departure in November 2013.
The law of attraction is the New Thought spiritual belief that positive or negative thoughts bring positive or negative experiences into a person's life. The belief is based on the idea that people and their thoughts are made from "pure energy" and that like energy can attract like energy, thereby allowing people to improve their health, wealth, or personal relationships. There is no empirical scientific evidence supporting the law of attraction, and it is widely considered to be pseudoscience or religion couched in scientific language. This belief has alternative names that have varied in popularity over time, including manifestation and lucky girl syndrome.
The philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of the mind and its relation to the body and the external world.
Erwin W. Lutzer is a Canadian-born evangelical Christian speaker, radio broadcaster, and author. He is the pastor emeritus of The Moody Church in Chicago, Illinois (1980–2016).
Haim G. Ginott was a school teacher, a child psychologist and psychotherapist and a parent educator. He pioneered techniques for conversing with children that are still taught today. His book, Between Parent and Child, stayed on the best seller list for over a year and is still popular today. This book sets out to give "specific advice derived from basic communication principles that will guide parents in living with children in mutual respect and dignity."
Carol Susan Dweck is an American psychologist. She holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University. Dweck is known for her work on motivation and mindset. She was on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Harvard, and Columbia before joining the Stanford University faculty in 2004. She was named an Association for Psychological Science (APS) James McKeen Cattell Fellow in 2013, an APS Mentor Awardee in 2019, and an APS William James Fellow in 2020, and has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2012.
In philosophy of mind, qualia are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term qualia derives from the Latin neuter plural form (qualia) of the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" in relation to a specific instance, such as "what it is like to taste a specific apple — this particular apple now".
Geoffrey Beattie is a British psychologist, author and broadcaster. He is Professor of Psychology at Edge Hill University and in 2023 was appointed Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and Wolfson College, University of Oxford. He has also been visiting professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, University of California Santa Barbara. He graduated with a First Class Honours degree from the University of Birmingham and a PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Human Givens is a niche theory in psychotherapy proposed by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell in the late 1990s, and amplified in the 2003 book Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking. Human Givens therapy draws on several psycho therapeutic models, such as motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioural therapy, psychoeducation, interpersonal therapy, imaginal exposure therapy and NLP such as the Rewind Technique.
