The Human Brain and Information Science: Lessons from Popular Neuroscience

Insights from the recent wealth of popular books on neuroscience are offered to suggest a strengthening of theory in information science. Information theory has traditionally neglected the human dimension in favour of ‘scientific’ theory often derived from the Shannon-Weaver model. Neuroscientists argue in excitingly fresh ways from the evidence of case studies, non-intrusive experimentation and the measurements that can be obtained from technologies that include electroencephalography, positron emission tomography (PET), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The way in which the findings of neuroscience intersect with ideas such as those of Kahneman on fast and slow thinking and Csikszentmihalyi on flow, is tentatively explored as lines of connection with information science. It is argued that the beginnings of a theoretical underpinning for current web-based information searching in relation to established information retrieval methods can be drawn from this.