ABSTRACT
For many with an engineering background, psychology seems a soft, fuzzy, ‘people’ business quite remote from their own tough-minded and rigorous technical concerns. But appearances can be deceptive. There are many psychologists, particularly those interested in human cognition-the study of attention, memory, thought, problem solving and the control of action-that think like engineers and are far removed from the popular stereotype of the ‘psychologist-asshrink’. Cognitive psychologists tend to treat the mind as something akin to an information-processing machine. But unlike most machines, opening it up and examining its structure would not reveal the workings of the human mind. All that could be seen by the unaided eye would be a large greyish-pink, spaghetti-like lump of nerve tissue and blood vessels. Of course, modern brain scanning devices could reveal much more, but even then the link between structure and function remains fairly mysterious.
