The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences Books
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Since the 1970s the cognitive sciences have offered multidisciplinary ways of understanding the mind and cognition. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) is a landmark, comprehensive reference work that represents the matter-of-fact and theoretical diversity of this changing field. At the core of the encyclopedia are 471 concise entries, from Acquisition and Adaptationism to Wundt and X-bar Theory. Each article, written by a leading researcher in the field, provides an accessible introduction to an vital concept in the cognitive sciences, as well as references or further readings. Six extended essays, which collectively serve as a roadmap to the articles, provide overviews of each of six major areas of cognitive science: Philosophy; Psychology; Neurosciences; Computational Intelligence; Linguistics and Language; and Culture, Cognition, and Evolution. For both students and researchers, MITECS will be an obligatory guide to the current state of the cognitive sciences.Amazon.com Review
The state-of-the-art knowledge about knowledge is contained within the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Its 471 comprehensive entries cover topics as diverse as “Hemispheric Area,” “Epiphenomenalism,” and “Algorithms” in 1,000 to 1,500 words each, painstakingly thwart-indexed and extensively referenced to launch further research. A few biographical entries are also included, highlighting such giants as Alan Turing and Santiago Ramón y Cajal. The editors selected their contributors well, assigning “Neurobiology of Consciousness” to Christof Koch and Francis Crick, for example. Even better, six longer essays initiate the Encyclopedia, each providing an overview of one of the six disciplines that overlap to form cognitive science: computational intelligence; culture, cognition, and evolution; linguistics and language; neurosciences; philosophy; and psychology. These are enormously helpful to the researcher, as they are general enough to allow simple entry but still meaty enough to be helpful themselves and as pointers to specific entries. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, even as not a casual entry into the field, is an essential addition to the reference shelf for anyone sincerely interested in AI, consciousness, or other aspects of natural and artificial brains. –Rob Lightner
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i am an engineering student and i delight in reading this book. Although many topics are about psychology, you can find all kind of different subjects that you will never find anywhere else. That is way it is so valuable. the book is very heavy.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is an brilliant add to any library dealing with the Cognitive Sciences or especially anyone new to that area of study. It is fantastically organized, simple to read and know, and provides detailed yet concise in rank on basically EVERY Cognitive topic. Perfect for the remotely curious reader too!
Rating: 5 / 5
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences – “MITECS” – is a truly brilliant book. MITECS is the book I spent four years wishing for back when I ongoing studying cognitive science. MITECS is also a very *large* book; I’ve set out to read all 471 articles, and I’m now on “Computational Neuroscience” (p. 166 of 900), although I’ve also read a lot of other articles as circumstances required. From that sample size, my comments:
The excellent news: There are some truly brilliant articles in this book. Microcolumns and macrocolumns, cerebellar chips, the pathways of the visual system – you can read this book and find out a hundred amazingly cool things that you never even realized you desperately needed to know. Oddly enough, MITECS is also a pretty excellent as an encyclopedia – if you suddenly need to know more about thought, you’ll find what you need to know in “Visual Anatomy and Physiology”. (Or “Visual Processing Streams”. Or “High-Level Thought”. Or “Computational Thought”. Or “Mental Rotation”. You do need to do a certain quantity of hunting, if it’s a sufficiently broad theme. More than half the intellectual cortex is devoted to thought – see “Mid-Level Thought” – and MITECS reflects this fact.)
MITECS *excels* as an authoritative reference; you’ll nearly never need to quote anything else. If you’re familiar with cognitive science, you’ll often laugh when you get to the end of an article and see the author’s byline: “Columns and Modules” by William Calvin, “Chinese Room Argument” by John Searle, “Evolutionary Computation” by Melanie Mitchell, “Evolutionary Psychology” by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
The terrible news: If you try to read MITECS linearly, you will find that many of the articles, perhaps even a majority, are eminently skippable. (For the record, I read them anyway.) As all of the articles were written by independent individuals – none of whom may possibly read the book first, since it didn’t exist yet – there is understandably a fantastic deal of duplication of in rank. Every third author feels the need to inform you that the mind is a computational in rank-processing system. (If I had one request to make of the hundreds of authors who write the next edition, it would be: “Skip all the introductory material and the philosophy and try to pack in as much helpful detail as you can.”) There are also some understandable problems with depth of coverage, made worse by the aforesaid tendency to write introductions; whenever I read an article about a topic that I had earlier studied in more detail, it really brought home the realization that each of these 471 articles tries to cover a topic about which *multiple* entire books have been written.
There are several things I’d like to see in future editions of this book. First and foremost is *less philosophy* and more focus on concrete details, particularly *surprising* details, or details that have something substantial to say about how the mind works. I don’t want to know what David Hume plotting about causality; I want to know if anything fascinating happens when research subjects are questioned to reason about causality. (I must also confess myself impassive in most of the biographical articles that form much of MITECS – but then, that’s probably because I’m not using it to study history.) Finally, I want to see a neuroanatomical index as well as a table of contents. It’s already a huge book, but they can afford another six pages to show a detailed neuroanatomical map, with names for the areas, and references to the apt sections of the book. Such a map would be an enormous help to those of us trying to build up a concrete visualization of the brain.
Conclusion: This is a *really excellent* book. It’s not so much “a excellent book with a few drawbacks” as “an brilliant book with tremendous potential for *even more* improvement”, and I mean this in all seriousness. If you’re a cognitive scientist, you have basically no choice but to buy this book. If you’re a student of the mind or a cognitive hobbyist, then this may not be the *first* book you buy, but you will buy it sooner or later.
It’s just such a fantastic book.
Rating: 5 / 5