Christopher Darren Green (born 1959) is a Canadian professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
In 1976, Green moved to the Montréal area to attend Vanier CEGEP where he earned a Diplôme d'études collégiales (DEC) in music with a specialization in jazz.
In 1979, he enrolled in music at McGill University but, by the end of the year, had become disenchanted with his future prospects as a professional musician.
During the summer of 1982, he moved back to his parents' home in Lennoxville and enrolled at Bishop's University to finish his psychology degree.
He decided to remain at Bishop's for the 1984–85 school year, where he spent most of his time working as a lighting and sound assistant at the university theater.
After his additional year at Bishop's, Green applied to graduate school again, this time in both psychology and theater.
Beginning at Simon Fraser in 1985, Green's MA supervisor was Bernard Lyman, who admired the Gestalt psychologists and sought to revive E. B. Titchener's method of rigorous introspection.
Nothing from the thesis was ever published, but the research process brought to Green's attention the Golden Section, a topic to which he would later return.
He had begun writing his major doctoral essays (on philosophy of science and psychology) when his supervisor, Lyman, became ill, dying in December 1988.
Green became interested in computational cognitive science and audited courses in connectionism taught by Geoffrey Hinton.
Finding no full-time academic position immediately after graduation, Green remained at Toronto, where he was given the title of "Special Lecturer" and taught various courses.
At the graduate level, he taught seminars on cognition, the history of psychology, and the work of Michel Foucault.
[1][2][3][4] Green was made a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (through the History Division (26)) in 2000,[5] primarily for his internet activities.
His dissertation returned to the topic of cognitive science, investigating whether connectionist networks served as "scientific models," as that phrase is understood in philosophy.
He showed that one popular class of connectionist networks, which are made up of units that are usually thought of as being idealized analogs of neurons (thus the nickname "neural nets"), seemed to perform worse rather than better as more realistic neurological assumptions were built into their operation.
In 2003, he finally published a book on ancient Greek and Roman psychological thought that he had co-authored with a graduate school friend, Philip Groff, mostly during the mid-1990s.
He worked on the rise and fall of Functionalism, creating two video documentaries on the topic in addition to several articles and book chapters.
[6] About 2010, he began using the new digital methods that were starting to capture various regions of the humanities and applying them to the study of the history of psychology.
In 2020 he won a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg.