How Minds Change

How Minds Change: Paradigm Shifts in Neuroscientific Thought offers a critical and historically grounded examination of how neuroscience has repeatedly transformed its own conception of the mind, the brain, and cognition. Rather than presenting neuroscience as a linear accumulation of empirical discoveries, this work argues that the field develops through episodic conceptual ruptures in which foundational assumptions about explanation, evidence, and the nature of neural function are reorganized.
Across its historical trajectory, neuroscience has redefined its object through successive paradigms: from mechanistic models of the body as an automaton, to localizationist mappings of function in cortical space, to electrophysiological circuit models grounded in neural signaling, and onward to computational, network-based, predictive, and embodied frameworks. Each paradigm does not merely refine previous knowledge, but reconstructs what counts as a brain, what counts as a function, and what counts as a valid scientific explanation.
Drawing on history and philosophy of science, cognitive neuroscience, and theoretical psychology, the book demonstrates that neuroscientific metaphors, such as machine, map, circuit, computer, network, and prediction system, are not descriptive conveniences but constitutive structures that shape perception, methodology, and theory-building. It further shows how technological developments, experimental tools, and broader cultural and institutional forces actively participate in producing the objects of neuroscientific knowledge.
Ultimately, the book argues that neuroscience is best understood not as a discipline converging on a final model of the mind, but as a recursive system of self-redefinition. The mind it studies is not a stable entity gradually revealed through improved measurement, but a historically shifting construct that is continuously reconfigured through changing paradigms of explanation. In this sense, neuroscience does not simply discover the mind, it repeatedly rewrites it.