“Given the tumultuous history of psychology and its relatively late application of mathematical techniques from dynamical systems theory, one could argue that the symbolic-computation approach to cognition, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s, was a necessary first approximation at characterizing mental activity—a first approximation that has run its course and served its purpose. For the new psychology on the horizon, perhaps we are ready to discard the metaphor of the mind as a computer, because its drawbacks now outweigh its advances, and replace it with a treatment of the mind as a natural continuous dynamical event—whose decidedly nonmetaphorical substrate consists of the brain and body and the environment with which they interact.”

Michael Spivey