The continual revolution of the scientific age has revealed time and time again that our intuitions regarding the natural world are too often too simple, and as one marvels at the wondrous complexity that is revealed by the avenues of discovery which have sprung up to replace them, these ultimately betray the utter failures of the primal, intuitive imagination.
At the dawn of the 21st century the products of the last several hundred years' studies in nearly every subject constitute the surest known ways to boggle the mind and to embarrass its previous misapprehensions of fact. The orientation and span of the cosmos, the origins of life, the causes of disease, the fundamental forces at work in the universe, these are all things about which the primitive peoples of the world can now be seen to have been quite wrong at a very fundamental level.
I invite the reader to consider the possibility that while the mind certainly does fall in that category, we cannot yet count it among the things which we do truly understand today, and that while the other sciences have gone from basic atomism to quantum mechanics, from 4 elements to 118 and counting, psychology remains perched on the brink of its own marvelous flight into the future.
It is my belief and conviction that today's psychologists, as well as those who deal with psychological matters and issues such as psychiatrists and social workers, are currently operating with a significantly limited set of tools for contending with the problems of the mind and its functions, and while its true that some are able to achieve a notable level of success in the amelioration of these they do so with limited precision and with limited means of understanding the underlying dynamics.
Our study of the brain, meanwhile, has certainly risen to marvelous heights, and new methods and research have uncovered wonder after wonder as we have looked deeper into our inner workings. And yet the weight of these discoveries has not thus far matriculated appropriately into the basic psychological understanding nor, surely, into the curriculum from which we instruct the next generation.
Still, it is inevitable now, as that weight continues to accumulate, that this discrepancy will eventually have to be resolved to conform to the facts as we now know them.
In this book I will attempt to aid that transition by submitting a new account of the mind's mechanics, drawing from several components and theories based in other disciplines, primarily neuroscience and general human biology, after which I will contribute a series of conclusions which I think are logically necessitated by the facts of the matter as they currently appear.
With this work I hope to resolve a number of the popular confounds by which modern psychology is confronted, and to impart both a means for the summary and clarification of subconscious operations, as well as a new conceptual view of the mind and its behaviors.
The continual revolution of the scientific age has revealed time and time again that our intuitions regarding the natural world are too often too simple, and as one marvels at the wondrous complexity that is revealed by the avenues of discovery which have sprung up to replace them, these ultimately betray the utter failures of the primal, intuitive imagination.
At the dawn of the 21st century the products of the last several hundred years' studies in nearly every subject constitute the surest known ways to boggle the mind and to embarrass its previous misapprehensions of fact. The orientation and span of the cosmos, the origins of life, the causes of disease, the fundamental forces at work in the universe, these are all things about which the primitive peoples of the world can now be seen to have been quite wrong at a very fundamental level.
I invite the reader to consider the possibility that while the mind certainly does fall in that category, we cannot yet count it among the things which we do truly understand today, and that while the other sciences have gone from basic atomism to quantum mechanics, from 4 elements to 118 and counting, psychology remains perched on the brink of its own marvelous flight into the future.
It is my belief and conviction that today's psychologists, as well as those who deal with psychological matters and issues such as psychiatrists and social workers, are currently operating with a significantly limited set of tools for contending with the problems of the mind and its functions, and while its true that some are able to achieve a notable level of success in the amelioration of these they do so with limited precision and with limited means of understanding the underlying dynamics.
Our study of the brain, meanwhile, has certainly risen to marvelous heights, and new methods and research have uncovered wonder after wonder as we have looked deeper into our inner workings. And yet the weight of these discoveries has not thus far matriculated appropriately into the basic psychological understanding nor, surely, into the curriculum from which we instruct the next generation.
Still, it is inevitable now, as that weight continues to accumulate, that this discrepancy will eventually have to be resolved to conform to the facts as we now know them.
In this book I will attempt to aid that transition by submitting a new account of the mind's mechanics, drawing from several components and theories based in other disciplines, primarily neuroscience and general human biology, after which I will contribute a series of conclusions which I think are logically necessitated by the facts of the matter as they currently appear.
With this work I hope to resolve a number of the popular confounds by which modern psychology is confronted, and to impart both a means for the summary and clarification of subconscious operations, as well as a new conceptual view of the mind and its behaviors.