CHAPTER 

 III 



INFORMATION PROCESSING THEORY 



Robert K. Lindsay, Ph.D. 



n 



'ESCARTES is usually credited with introducing the mind- 

 body problem to psychology. What he did was introduce the body 

 to psychology. In those days, of course, there were no card-carrying 

 psychologists, but there were many people who were interested 

 in the huinan thought processes, which were assumed to reside 

 in a mysterious nonentity called the mind. Descartes wished to 

 show how the mind influenced the motions of the body, and in 

 so doing he made some guesses as to how the body itself might have 

 something to do with decision making. The abstracted description 

 of the control mechanism which Descartes provided sounded much 

 like a description of the inechanical statues which were found in 

 the gardens of his day. He described nerves as hollow tubes 

 through which ran bell ropes of the sort used to summon servants. 

 These bell ropes, when stimulated, manipulated valves in the head 

 which directed the flow of animal spirits from the ventricles of 

 the brain to the inflatable muscles. The expansion of the muscles 

 brought about movement. The mind was, in this model, adjoined 

 to the body through the pineal gland, which served as a sort of 

 master control which could override any of the other valves, thus 

 maintaining the integrity of the free will. 



Descartes' system, though somewhat obsolete today, was, in its 

 time, quite ingenious. Even though men are no longer profitably 

 viewed as garden decorations, Descartes and his notions can be 

 credited with having thrown a great deal of light on the working 

 of the human control system. 



Although advances in physiology have shown the preceding 

 model to be inadequate, such knowledge has not eliminated the 



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