This post first appeared on aud.life

Earlier this year, I was at an API event chatting with @wirehead about my progress on Teaching Machines and about the history of education psychology and education automation, when he made a really sharp observation that’s stuck with me since: “In a couple of hundred years, people will view our ‘science of the mind’ much like we now view ‘the humours’.”

The humours: the ancient but long-standing theory that the human body is filled with (by the Greek’s accounts) four substances – blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm corresponding to air, fire, earth, and water respectively – that when out of balance, cause disease. We can scoff, I suppose, as “science” now tells us otherwise. But for a long time the humours did inform science; at least, they certainly informed medicine. Those who believed in the humours were not un- or anti-scientific.

And despite “knowing better” now, the humours haven’t disappeared from the way in which we see personality or well-being. If nothing else, we still carry with us today this idea that staying healthy is all about “balance.”

Psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience – all we think we know about thinking and knowing – will some day sound as silly as the stuff that Hippocrates wrote around 400 BC. Some of it already does. That’s not to say these aren’t “science” – they’re just primitive. Some of what we thought we knew about “the mind” has already been challenged – Freud’s contributions, for example, not to mention the field’s (non-) replicability, its racism.

But none of that really matters, does it? Shouting “it’s not a real science” gets us nowhere. With or without “proof” we seem to be increasingly convinced of and by “the science of the mind.” We know it works, mostly by the bestsellers and the advertisements, and as such we seek its insights.

So whether it’s accurate or not, “the science of the mind” – even as a nascent field of study – has already had profound implications for social behaviors, expectations, and institutions.

This is particularly true in education, which purports to be about “the mind” – intelligence, knowledge, expertise and the practices to extend those things from one generation or one body to the next.

But it’s even moreso for education technology which literally has its roots in the field of psychology. So if psychology is today’s “humours,” what does that mean for the tools that we’re building to implement its core beliefs?