Mind in Motion explores a fundamental question about human cognition: Why does the mind possess the organization it does? Drawing across cognitive science and neuroscience, the book develops an integrated account of cognition as an adaptive system whose structure becomes intelligible through the recurring problems it must solve.
The book begins with the biological and evolutionary foundations that make adaptive cognition possible before confronting a deeper problem: how can cognition maintain sufficient continuity while experience accumulates, circumstances change, and the future remains uncertain? From this starting point, the argument develops cumulatively. Each adaptive solution alters the conditions confronting the system, generating further requirements that cognition must accommodate.
As the investigation progresses, capacities commonly studied separately—including memory, prediction, valuation, reinforcement, self-modeling, salience, and reflection—become intelligible as interdependent components of a developing adaptive organization. The analysis gradually expands from processes within the individual to the relationship between cognition and the environments through which it develops and acts. Drawing together findings from across cognitive science and neuroscience, the book reveals a larger logic connecting these capacities.
The resulting framework presents cognition as a developing adaptive system whose accumulated solutions continually transform the conditions of subsequent adaptation. Mind in Motion offers an integrative framework for understanding why cognition possesses its characteristic organization and how adaptive organization develops, persists, and changes as the conditions of future adaptation are themselves transformed.