Britt Anderson

A brief career history and a whinge but first,

An optimistic claim and

I think those interested in minds (as opposed to brains) have their best chance to develop new, deep, explanatory, and testable theories of cognition than they have ever had since the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline in the mid 1800s.

A hard truth

The exercise of that opportunity will require an education and a practice that is very different from what we have done for the last several decades. It will replace a practical emphasis on statistics with a host of abstract mathematics. Programming will no longer be something peripheral that you do to clean up some data or put pictures on a monitor, but it will be a fundamental part of your scientific path. It will involve learning difficult and new programming languages that emphasize expressing things formally and verifiably. Despite its difficulty this is the path that will lead to new insights into the nature of mental operations. Either psychology will alter course to center such an approach or it will become, in my heterodox opinion, increasingly irrelevant.

A short career recap

My professional career began in academic neurology. During that phase I saw patients, and wrote on hemispatial neglect. But I was also interested in general intelligence so I did experiments running rats in mazes, and counting neurons and measuring dendrites via Golgi stains. That technical competence led to similar projects with human brains including Einstein’s. Ultimately I came to feel that my papers were not saying anything deep or generalizable. They were giving clear descriptions of the data, but they hypotheses they explored where either obvious or idiosyncratic. I did not feel I had the vocabulary to express concrete, explanatory, generalizable theories. In fact, to be honest, I didn’t feel anyone in what was then called behavioral neurology had that ability. So, I left medicine to earn a PhD at Brown in Brain Sciences. That was a great program for me. They accepted my neuro-credentials and allowed me to pick up some of the math and computing that contemporary pre-med education lacks. While Brain Science at Brown still exists its format has changed and I don’t think they even grant a “Brain Science” PhD anymore, but I got one. During my time at Brown I gained experience with awake behaving primate experiments and recording from multiple neurons simultaneously. In its day our Thomas 5 electrode system was cutting edge. After Brown I came to the University Waterloo where I have looked for the opportunity to bring mathematical ideas into the world of cognitive neuroscience. I am part of the University’s Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, and I have conducted experiments with a wide arrange of participants: young people, old people, brain damaged people, and with a wide range of techniques: fMRI, EEG, eye tracking, and computational modeling. But as I enter my curmudgeon years I have started to see computational neuroscience as really just a field of biology. I guess I had hoped that its models would have generalized to jumpstart a theoretical computational psychology. They have not. And I have also started to see cognitive neuroscience as really just behaviorism with a new name. We basically have S-R psychology with intercalated neural correlates (S-NCs-R psychology). For my future I will be focusing on looking for a single mathematical language useful for expressing cognitive models of all sorts and leading to direct verifiable statements as computer code. Today, July 2025, I think that mathematical language is category theory, and I would go so far as to conjecture that any cognitive process deserving of the name has a formalization as a hypergraph. The programming language of theoretical psychology’s future will be dependently typed. I am currently struggling to learn Lean.

I am interested in working with students to test and develop these ideas

Feel free to reach out if any of the above intrigues you, or even if all you want to do is disagree.