To Raise Man's Potential

The wildfire interest of U.S. educators in a Harvard psychologist named Jerome Bruner began last year when he published a slim book titled The Process of Education (TIME, Sept. 26, 1960). Its bold and challenging hypothesis: "Any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest way to any child at any stage of development."

Bruner's book was a product of his consuming interest, which is "the great question of how you know anything"-in a word, cognition. Now Bruner is co-directing Harvard's new Center for Cognitive Studies, which he and Psychologist George Miller opened a year ago in the house once occupied by Harvard's President (1869-1909) Charles Eliot.

An Unknown Field. How humans think and learn has been investigated enough by teachers and philosophers over 20 or 30 centuries to produce a set of working rules—for example, six is supposedly the right age for children to start school. But scientific study of the functions of the brain—memory, perception, intuition, imagination, conceptualization —has hardly been touched. Less has been learned about learning in humans than about learning in animals: Pavlov's dogs, for example, or the pingpong-playing pigeons that led to the invention of the teaching machine. The hope in organizing a Center for Cognitive Studies is to bring together psychologists, physiologists, philosophers, linguistics experts, and even certain technicians who can offer experience with computers. Then, relying heavily on experiments, they try "to work out a theory of intelligence—the nature of the human mind."

What is clear is that the mind is assaulted by billions of events, objects, people and impressions (including some 7,000,000 discriminable colors). Yet, notes Bruner, "people can handle only a limited amount of information at one time." To make sense in this plight, humans rely chiefly on categorization and hypothesis-making. They group phenomena in terms of common properties—hot, cold, safe or dangerous. In thus categorizing things to arrive at concepts, they move from an "open hypothesis" stage of rejecting inappropriate information to a "closed hypothesis" stage of suddenly deciding "this is it." Especially with children, a basic problem is learning to take more things into account before jumping to conclusions. Such training is one of the main interests of the Center for Cognitive Studies.

The research strategy is to interrupt thought processes and study them in parts. For example, visual perception involves seeing many things simultaneously. Bruner breaks down this process with a gadget called an "ambiguitor," which brings a picture into focus so gradually that a viewer gets trapped into false hypotheses about what he is seeing. Result: embryo techniques for perceiving more astutely. The Center bustles with other odd projects, from teaching quadratic functions to young children to time-lapse photographs of tots drawing (the best way to see how they see). All this is pure research, but out of it may someday come a revolution in U.S. education.