BI 248 Andrea Hiott: The Navigational Approach to the Mind

Paul Middlebrooks talks with Andrea Hiott, a philosopher at Universität Heidelberg with degrees across philosophy and neuroscience, about her book Holding Paradox: The Navigational Approach to Mind. A theme running through her work is that we need to go beyond dichotomous thinking and learn to hold paradoxes as they are. The navigational approach is her proposal for what should replace the computational metaphor of the mind. In the book she uses the history of research on the hippocampus to illustrate both ideas: the hippocampus has two parallel research histories, one treating it as the seat of memory and the other as a cognitive map for how we move through the world and through our thoughts.