Genes, Brains, and Human Potential The Science and Ideology of Intelligence

A CREATIVE COGNITION 223

In humans, cognition evolved in further spectacular ways, as we shall
see in chapter  9. In the meantime, we should not forget that all this
emergent activity infl uences physiology, cell metabolism, and gene tran-
scription. Together these activities make up nested systems that furnish
adaptability by transcending direct experience. Th ey further indicate the
dangers of collapsing such multi- level systems into the rules governing
only one of them, as in attempts to reduce cognitive functions, and indi-
vidual diff erences in them, to neural activity per se.

PROPERLY DESCRIBING COGNITION

Real cognitive systems, then, consist of co ali tions of attractors, from sen-

sory reception to higher cognition. What are usually identifi ed as key com-

ponents of cognition are all emergent properties of such co ali tions at vari-

ous levels— perception, conceptual categorization, learning, knowledge,

memory, thinking, and so on. Th ere has been a tendency to describe these

as in de pen dent systems with genet ically determined pro cessing. But they

are aspects of self- organ izing systems based on shared co- variations,

the structures of experience. Let us take a quick look at some of them.

Learning

I described developmental plasticity in chapters 5 and 6. It evolved to

provide the adaptability in changeable environments not pos si ble from

gene- determined functions. Learning is lifelong developmental plasticity

(in the brain) for dealing with lifelong environmental change. In dynam-

ical terms, we say that learning is the continuous updating of attractors

in extensive attractor landscapes.

Th is updating happens even in single cells and in development and

physiology, as we have seen. In cognitive systems, as Walter Freeman ex-

plains, “learning establishes attractor landscapes in the sensory cortices,

with a basin of attraction for each class of stimuli that the animals have

learned to identify. Th e basins of attraction are continually re- shaped by

experience, and each attractor is accessed by the arrival of a stimulus of

its learned class.”^20 Th e most basic attractors are those assimilating the

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