ABSTRACT
Early psychologists liked the idea of being able to explain consciousness in terms of fundamental neural mechanisms such as excitation and inhibition, but the danger they saw was that if consciousness could be reduced to neural processes, then psychology would be neurology and have no place of its own in science-so they rejected this way of accounting for consciousness. Today, new computational modelling techniques are able to explain some psychological processes in terms of excitation and inhibition, that is, similar to neural processes. These connectionist or parallel distributed processing accounts of cognition will be discussed later, and are believed to be powerful because they are based on similar principles to those on which neurons in the brain operate.
