In the new review article, 'Categorization is Baked into the Brain,' cognitive scientists Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, university distinguished professor at Northeastern University, contend that categorization is part of a predictive process the brain uses to efficiently meet the body's needs in a fast-paced, otherwise overwhelming sensory world. In that sense, their paper in Nature Reviews Neuroscience challenges decades of dogma about how and why the brain boils down what it sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels. Categories are groups of things that are similar enough to be considered functionally equivalent. When you walk through a neighborhood, you'll naturally experience the furry, four-legged, barking animal ahead of you as a 'dog.' In the classic view of cognition, your brain arrives at that categorization by soaking in lots of basic sensory features of the hound ' its shape, its size, the sounds it makes, its behavior '...
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