#1296 overall
Cognitive Processes
MIT OpenCourseWare
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2013 · score 0.7
An MIT undergraduate course in cognitive psychology covering how the mind processes information. The OpenCourseWare materials include lecture notes from the Spring 2004 offering.
A commenter calls it one of MIT's definitive classes in cognitive psychology and says they took it as an undergraduate and found it a great class.
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They are not just neuroscientists and they do study the mind. You might have looked at the first sentence on the department's website:
"MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences stands at the nexus of neuroscience, biology and psychology."
Or looked at the first sentence for the department in the MIT course catalog:
"The study of mind, brain, and behavior has grown in recent years with unprecedented speed."
In fact, You can get an undergraduate degree from this department taking only a single neuroscience course and all the rest being cognitive psychology and cognitive science classes. Furthermore, the department offers a minor in psychology, but not in neuroscience.
And, for your edification, here is the online material for the course Cognitive Processes, which is one of MIT's definitive classes in cognitive psychology:
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/brain-and-cognitive-sciences/9-65...
I took this class as an undergraduate, and it is a great class. The famous childhood development psychology professor, Susan Carey, taught this class when I took it.
Arguing with you seems fruitless: You just assert things that are patently false without bothering to do the most basic of research or even just listening to what has been said to you. You might even just consider the name of the department: "cognitive" refers to the mind, not the brain, and "cognitive science" is a synonym for "cognitive psychology". (Though when using the term "cognitive science", the study is a bit broader, adding in cross-disciplinary research from artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind. MIT is big on cross-disciplinary research.)
How do I know this? Well, I might have just spent a few minutes looking things it up before spouting off, but I also have a degree in cognitive science from MIT.
There's no one psychology. Have you studied any history of science? Have you read Kuhn? Throughout all of the history of science there have been divisions in scientific fields and "paradigm shifts". As Kuhn pointed out, the old generation has to literally die off before the new paradigm in a field can become the new orthodoxy. Until that happens, many scientists in scientific fields will cling desperately to their already disproven theories. Just look at Einstein, for instance. Why didn't he win a Noble Prize for Relativity? Because there were many physicists who did not yet accept Relativity, even long past the point in time when it was irrefutable.
Enough time has not passed for cognitive psychology to become the orthodoxy of psychology, but some day it will be. Cognitive psychology is not going to be "replaced" by neuroscience, but it will be informed by it. And vice versa. The two fields have always informed each other.
Also, unfortunately, our understanding of the human mind scientifically is not yet strong enough to offer a whole lot to clinical psychologists, so the establishment of cognitive psychology as the new orthodoxy through all of psychology will no doubt be delayed by the needs of clinical psychologists to do their jobs, rather than just telling people with mental illness to go home and chill for the next 50 years, until we understand the human mind and human brain better.
As for "explanation", you completely ignored what I said. If you continue this, there's little point in having a discussion with you. There's no discussion if someone just talks and does not listen. I'll repeat this one more time, however: Physics has not explained why conservation of energy is true. It merely has noted this fact, and has asserted that it is the case based on empirical induction.
Other things, of course, are explained in terms of conservation of energy, but conservation of energy has not been explained. The same thing was true for Behaviorism. It didn't explain why the mind was putatively nothing but a large collection of simple learned responses to external stimuli. That was its main premise, which was a hypothesis based on scientific observation, etc. But Behaviorism certainly attempted to explain all the rest of psychology in terms of this premise. And it's a universal principle of rational thought, that once you have identified laws and/or principals, you can use these laws and principles to explain other things, even if you have no explanation for the laws themselves.
In any case, Behaviorism's problem was that their model was wrong, and so the explanations failed to pan out, except in certain constrained situations, like training animals. Of course now we know that even those explanations are over-simplified, but they are explanations, nonetheless. In any non-fundamental science, however, comprehensible explanations are likely to be over-simplified. The human mind can only grasp so much complexity and many natural phenomena are hugely complex.