ZEHAO.LOG
Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science EP1, An Introduction: What Is Cognitive Science?

Mar 26, 2022·7 min read

I have wanted to write a whole series of essays about cognitive science for a long time.

Cognitive science is a field that is hugely popular abroad and yet barely known back home. I do not know whether the 21st century will turn out to be the century of the life sciences, but I do know it will be the century of cognitive science.

Since I am no great scholar, and since cognitive science is a frontier field that keeps correcting and reinventing itself, with new theories born and old ones overturned every single day, the references, the older conclusions, and the personal reflections I offer here may all contain factual errors.

So please, criticize and correct me freely. Reach me however you like. I am genuinely looking forward to hearing what you think. 👏

Cognitive science EP1

An introduction: what is cognitive science?

Cognitive science is a frontier, cross-disciplinary field that asks how the human brain, or the mind, actually works. It is also a fairly young one.

Back in 1975, a group of scholars pulled six big fields together, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and neuroscience, to study a single question: how is information passed along during the act of knowing? The result of that research program was a brand new field, cognitive science. It is young, but it has already made an indelible contribution to the greatest cosmic riddle of all, the question of how the brain works.

Image The "maze" in Westworld is a metaphor for consciousness

"How do humans think? How do we come to know the world?" This is one of the oldest and hardest questions we have ever asked.

  • The philosopher

Philosophers care about the nature of concepts and where their boundaries lie. They turn things over in their heads: what is "knowledge"? What is "reason"? What is "thinking"? - The psychologist

Psychologists carry two temperaments at once, the analytic and the experimental. Some of them ask what the structure of the human mind looks like. Others study the biological machinery of perception. - The linguist

Linguists noticed that human thought and cognition are inseparable from "language." They ask how we acquire language, and how language in turn shapes the way we think. - The anthropologist

Anthropologists bring depth in time, and they come ready with the records of every people and culture on earth. They want to know whether geography and culture leave their fingerprints on cognition, and how the capacity to think and to know ever arose from nothing at all. - The computer scientist

Computer scientists are practical people who care about building the thing. They want machines that can learn to think, machines with intelligence. They study how to handle vision with code, and how on earth you would write the algorithm for "thinking." - The neuroscientist

If the brain is the organ of thought and the neuron is its medium, then we have no choice but to understand and map how the brain and the nervous system do their work. Neuroscientists care about the structure of neurons and how they process signals, about how functions get pinned to particular regions of the brain, and about what the network of connections among neurons inside the skull actually looks like.

We all know that what we call an academic discipline is really nothing more than a set of research practices built up around one "question of fundamental importance." But little by little, researchers in different corners began to realize something. Their methods did not match, their traditions did not match, and yet the big question underneath was the same. To crack the problem of thought and cognition, what we need is not the tools and findings of any single field. We need theory and insight that reach across many of them at once.

And so cognitive science was born. I do not know whether the 21st century will be the century of the life sciences, but I do know it will be the century of cognitive science.

In fact, it is not only those six pillar fields. Many more areas of study have crashed into this cross-disciplinary carnival too, weaving themselves deeply into cognitive science.

A few examples, picked almost at random:

  • Behavioral economics

Behavioral economics is a fashionable sub-branch of economics right now. It blends cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and economics in order to find the errors and omissions in today's economic models, and then to repair the shaky assumptions that mainstream economics makes about people: that we are rational, self-interested, fully informed, utility-maximizing, and consistent in our preferences. - Neurolaw

Neurolaw is a corner of legal science that grew up around the 1990s. It mainly uses the research methods and technical tools of cognitive neuroscience to probe the brain's neural activity, and then to analyze, interpret, and investigate questions in both legal theory and legal practice. - Neuroaesthetics

Neuroaesthetics is ~~a notoriously old chestnut of an IELTS reading passage~~ a relatively new sub-branch of experimental aesthetics, grounded in neural perception and artistic creation. It explains and understands beauty at the scale of the nervous system, asking whether activity in the same region of the brain lines up with aesthetic experiences that come from very different sources.

Cognitive science is not merely a "discipline." It is a "paradigm." As functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) matured, and as the algorithms and hardware behind artificial intelligence and deep learning fell into place, we finally found a real opening: a way to study "how humans think and perceive" from the inside of science itself. Thought and perception are no longer a purely conceptual philosophical question. There is finally hope of answering them well, within the framework of science.

Every time I read a book or a paper in this field, I feel a particular kind of jolt, the sense that the world has just been turned upside down. Stella, who taught my "Introduction to Cognitive Science" course, used to say it is a field where the researcher's mind has to be allowed to run wild. How do we surface up out of sleep? How do we decide what to eat in the dining hall? These are wonderful questions, and today's science cannot answer a single one of them.

The work here comes from all over the map: philosophy, psychology, computation, biology, and on and on. Whatever your background happens to be, your knowledge can spark something new.

The unsolved problems lie everywhere here, and so does the sheer hunger to know.

There are no "stupid questions" here. The door stays open, always, to anyone who loves to think, to ask, and to dig.

This is Ningningjinghai. Thank you for reading all the way through.

Image source:

Westworld S1 E10, still

Cognitive ScienceEssayInterdisciplinaryMind
‹ Back to all posts