Mind: A Brief Introduction (John R. Searle) / quote 74 of 138
The research program of cognitive science
And we now have a research project; indeed, it is the research project of cognitive science. We try to discover the programs that are implemented in the brain by designing programs for our commercial machines that will pass the Turing test, and then we ask the psychologists to perform experiments on humans to see if they are following the same program as the program on our computer. For example, in one famous experiment involving the memory of numbers, the reaction times of the subjects seemed to vary in the same way as the processing time of a computer. This seemed to a lot of cognitive scientists good evidence that the humans were using the algorithmic procedures of the computer.