the construct of mindfullness 3

Other areas currently being investigated through a mindfulness lens include decision making (see Langer, 1994, for a theoretical review), evaluation, meditation and Eastern religious practices, and emotion. The work described in the current issue further demonstrates the breadth of application possibilities of this construct, ranging from interaction with computers to understanding of mental retardation.

Mindfulness, Cognition, and Computers

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The question of how mindfulness relates to intelligence, cognitive abilities and cognitive styles is considered in the issue's next article, by Robert Steinberg. He concludes that although there is some overlap with other types of cognitive processes, and it is most like the construct of cognitive style, the concept of mindfulness has some unique properties. We are not in complete agreement with his conclusion that mindfulness is most like a cognitive style because, in our view, a style is not expected to change over time and through different circumstances, whereas the essence of mindfulness is change.

We prefer to consider the problem of the relation between mindfulness and other types of cognitive processes in terms of whether something is reducible to an algorithm for processing information. Having a particular cognitive style cannot be mindful, by definition, because it is precisely the sensitivity to the novel and, therefore, unexpected (i.e., nonalgorithmic) that is one of the key components of mindfulness. The French philosopher Giles Deleuze captured part of the spirit of mindfulness when he wrote, "To the answer embedded in every question, answer with a question from a different answer" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).

The algorithmic aspects of problem-solving behavior have been extensively addressed by the literature on cognition and problem solving (Newell, 1990) and this has had a major effect on cognitive psychology. Paradoxically, although this early work established a whole new approach to the mapping of cognitive processes, it also limited the scope of what a mind-mapping venture could look like.

The Simon-Newell paradigm (Newell, 1990) is based on what has been called the mind-as-computer metaphor (Gigerenzer & Goldstein, 1996). The central tenet of this metaphor is that mental processes are nothing more than algorithmic processes, or processes that can be simulated by general-purpose computational devices, such as a digital computer. This central tenet is, by definition, irrefutable, because it contains a set of cognitive commitments that we commonly use to refer to a problem. According to this view, solving large arrays of linear equations is a legitimate problem and an adequate topic for the study of mental processes because the answer is computable by a finite algorithm working on a finite-state computational device. Inventing a new topology for a space-time--as Einstein did--would not be a legitimate problem for this view (or would be considered an ill-posed problem) because it is not susceptible to formulation as the input to a finite-state computational device. Thus, the cognitive abilities s cholar cannot account for acts of creation of new concepts, even something like the general theory of relativity, that have become new paradigms in their fields. In contrast, the student of mindfulness focuses often on those particular cognitive processes that defy immediate algorithmic representation.