Psychological misinformation: Does cognition = thought?
There’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in psychology: cognition. It is used in scientific circles, and it has permeated into the community. And when I hear it, it seems to be used interchangeably with thought. Including by mental health workers, making it potential misinformation. In this post, I show why I consider it misinformation, and address some of the major issues that this creates.
Unfortunately, this issue puts me at odds with a big portion of my own community, in the cognitive-behavioral therapy world.
Cognition: Foundational points
First, it’s important to recognize the linguistic dimension here. Cognition and thought are words, and as such, their function is to communicate meaning. For communities where the meaning is effectively communicated as one single idea, they will be used interchangeably. There are different communities, however, and different meanings to convey. So a linguistic point here is that there isn’t a right answer, simply a consideration of how they are working in practice. Are they conveying meanings effectively across different communities? How does the mixing of language between communities affect how people take and use these ideas?
These become sociological questions. This is, of course, why there is a whole subfield of sociolinguistics.
Community use of terms
Thought
The word “thought” has had very little attention in science. Doubtlessly much more in the arts and philosophy, but not science. (This is perhaps changing, as theorists in the AI world consider the idea of thinking machines.) Therefore, there are really only two communities that have used it: as a public, general use word, and in psychology. Even in psychology, researchers have often shunned the notion of addressing thoughts as unscientific. “Methodological behaviorism” argues that science can only address measurable things, and that only quantifiable, observable behaviors are measurable. In other words, thoughts are irrelevant to the science of psychology, if you are a methodological behaviorist. (I am not – I am a “radical behaviorist.” I view thoughts, as well as other experiences, as internal behaviors. The experiencer themselves can measure and address them accordingly.)
I probably don’t need to define thought for you – it’s so commonly used that you know from experience. Just to put it out there, though: a thought is a conscious mental experience of an idea, generally through words or imagery.
Cognition
The word “cognition,” on the other hand, is well used in scientific communities. In college, my specific area of focus within my major was “cognitive neuroscience”, which fell at the overlap of “cognitive science” and neuroscience. Cognitive science was my school’s way of making cognitive psychology, also a field, sound more, well, science-y. There is a scientific journal, simply titled, “Cognition.” In fact, there are dozens of journals using the word, and connecting it with areas such as memory, emotion, neuroscience, instruction, etc. Cognitive tests don’t ask for people’s thoughts: they assess features of mental processes, such as executive functioning, working memory, and processing speed. It is important to recognize the wide range of use: while many of these fall into or overlap with psychology, many do not.
And while researchers explore cognition across a wide diversity of life, not just people, they only really use thoughts for humans. No one has thought to give their dog or cat a thought record. (Which is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tool. Not that other animals don’t think – but we generally have no way of accessing their thoughts.)
What is a cognition, then? Ay, there’s the rub. If you look across all scientific use, you’ll notice that it is used to describe all processes in the brain. Thoughts are cognitions; but so are sensory processes. Motor urges. Pain processing. Memory processes. Control over breathing, hormones. Cognitive networks. And in contrast to the definition of thought, most cognitive experiences are not conscious. So therefore, cognition is perhaps any internal experience mediated by the brain/nervous system, in any form, whether conscious or not. (I say brain with some hesitation; there’s growing evidence about the gut-brain, and potentially other layers of experiencing.)
Cognition: Uses
Now I’m a clinical psychologist, meaning I apply psychological science directly to work with people, i.e. therapy. So the problems I am identifying here, about the uses of cognition, are in its use in psychotherapy. There may be other problems other people find in other contexts, but I wouldn’t necessarily know about those.
The cognitive revolution
Remember my reference to methodological and radical behaviorism? From the 1920s through the 1950s, most behaviorists went with the methodological version. Behaviorists ignored thoughts. Think exposure therapy, the main therapy tool at the time, in its form of systematic desensitization (which is, exposure to the feared entity and replacing avoidance with engaging through relaxation exercises). In the 1960s, clinicians and researchers increasingly grumbled that people’s internal experiences are important, too. Grrr. Some of this dissatisfaction came from people like Ellis and Beck, who were trained psychoanalysts (i.e., Freud and his descendants), and who weren’t happy with analysis but trained to focus on internal experiences.
These psychiatrists/psychologists, searching for an evidence-based solution, latched onto a specific finding: the cognitive black box. Building on a classic study by Tolman (1948), titled, Cognitive maps in rats and men, the people who would become cognitive therapists pointed out that given a single input, different people show different responses, which can only be explained through something happening within the specific individuals (the black box). Tolman demonstrated that rats created selective mental maps of mazes that they could then use to efficiently navigate beyond the original set of maze arms.
Behaviorists (including Tolman) long put this to an interaction of neurology with learning history, but cognitive therapists began to view thoughts, which they called cognitions, as active contributors. They called upon the muses, linking this idea to ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus, who wrote, “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.” Or Shakespeare, who channeled Epictetus into Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” (Act 2, scene 2).
A curious cognitive connection
Their conclusion? Change your cognition or thought, and you change how you feel and respond. Thus was born the cognitive triad of thoughts, emotions, and behavior, and the therapeutic technique of cognitive restructuring.
Try going back to Tolman, and asking him if the rats learned maze routes by changing their thoughts. (Don’t forget your time machine.)
Psychological misinformation: Cognition conclusions (part 1)
I’ve gone over the terms, cognition and thought, and some of their uses. I’ve talked about how cognition became used by some psychologists as a fusion between thoughts and brain processes. Even though cognition refers to a huge range of brain processes, not just thoughts. Next time, we will get into the problems that comes from this misinformative fusion.