"For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have treated mental processes as though they involved passing discrete packets of information in a strictly feed-forward fashion from one cognitive module to the next or in a string of individuated binary symbols -- like a digital computer," said Spivey

An assertion with no substantiation, that is not really a general truth. Some researchers have used simplified models of the sort flippantly described, but those working in the same kinds of studies as the one reported, and in numerous other lines of study, have generally qualified their assumptions and recognized that real mental processes are not strictly binary - which is really what the article is all about. The "conclusion" in the article has been an integral understanding in the analyses of cyberneticists since before Norbert Weiner in the 1940s.

The work reported here looks pretty good, but it's not an earthshaking new and novel concept as the short review attempts to depict it. It's another "possibly useful" contribution to a long line of studies that attempt, with more or less success, to "model" thinking (and reacting) processes with a wide variety of methods.

Attempts to create "fuzzy state" devices where logic(?) can be implemented other than as discrete on/off states in physical objects have been a regularly recurring subject of study for decades (with relatively little success) simply because many researchers have recognized what this report claims to have "discovered." A couple of different "trinary" (3-state switch) devices are known, but one researcher several decades ago described the "brain" as a "highly interconnected analog device containing trainable preferred-state elements and interconnections." Not exactly a simple binary/digital machine.

John