Psychology of Cognition

This unique treatise expands on the philosophy of technology to argue for a psychology of technology based on the complex relationships between psychology, biology and technology, especially in the light of our relationships with our digital devices, our online lives, and our human experience. Drawing from disciplines ranging from philosophy and evolution to cognition and neuroscience, it examines myriad aspects of the brain’s creative development: the cognitive, sensory, and motor processes that enable technological progress and its resulting efficiencies and deficiencies along with our discomforts and pleasures. These experiences are key to behavioral and affective processes in technology, manifest in such diverse phenomena as multitasking, the shift in tech design from ergonomics to hedonomics, and the many types of online problem behaviors. Through these rich pages, readers can understand more deeply the history and future of human adjustment and adaptation in an environment intertwined with technology—and, with the ascendance of video games and virtual reality, new conceptions of the human self.

This monograph is an extension of the earlier monographs dealing with the application of the new modified involuted manifold model. This monograph has two objectives. Firstly, it seeks to integrate neuronal organization with cognitive functionalities. Secondly, it tries to formalize a structural template of cognitive functionalities. It is based on the postulate that cognitive functionalities are essentially natural phenomena and therefore amenable to formal naturalistic description. Therefore, it employs a topological model of spacetime proposed earlier to define a new framework wherein neuronal networks occupy the four-dimensional configurations of spacetime, and cognitive functionalities occupy higher dimensional configurations of spacetime. Using the Darwinian conception of natural selection, the monograph outlines a model of natural selection operating at more than one level.