Before long the misrepresentations were assumed to be facts and never questioned. The pendulum is swinging back, however. Hopefully it will end up at a productive center point. Some have argued that a computer should not be conceived of as a physical piece of hardware but just a way o processing information. Traditionally, however, computers have been used as metaphors in which their principles and mechanics are applied to understanding internal processes.
Cognitive psychologists make inferences about how the brain works based on how a computer works.
This has been a fruitful venture except when some psychologists forget that they are only inferences and might not reflect reality. Also, the untrained public may also assume some of the inferences are actually fact. For example, many people believe we have things stored in our brain called long term memories just like a computer stores bytes on a hard drive. This is not true. We know that the brain is a dynamic thing and that certain areas control our ability to remember.