The Perception & Action Podcast 560 – Ecological Cognition II: Resonance
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Feb 10, 2026 A lively tour of resonance as an alternative to brain-as-computer thinking. Everyday demos and Gibson's resonance metaphor show how organism and environment can lock together. Discussions cover neural reuse, multifractal timescales, nested coupling across scales, and how nonlinear resonance could underlie perceptual learning and flexible behavior.
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Cognition As Resonant Coupling
- Rob Gray reframes cognition as resonance: the brain orients perception-action organs to resonate with external information rather than compute it.
- This shifts explanation from internal computation to dynamic coupling between organism and environment.
Why Computation Dominated Cognition
- Vincente Raja argues computation became dominant because it provided a clear mechanistic story for cognition.
- Raja contrasts this with ecological psychology, which explains psychological processes at the agent–environment scale.
Detecting Rather Than Computing
- If ecological information exists, perceivers need only detect it rather than compute missing data.
- Gibson's view: computation was invented to solve a non-problem — stimulus poverty — that doesn't exist.
