What is Cognitive Science?
Do you know ... ?
- You have about 200 billion computers in your brain? Each neuron in your brain is a tiny computer!
- The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences was set up at HKU in 2005. This important research centre was approved by China's Central Government's Ministry of Science and Technology, in recognition of the importance of Cognitive Science.
- 1990-1999 was declared "the Decade of the Brain" in the US.
Cognitive science is the science of mind and behavior.
Although cognitive science is a relatively new multi-disciplinary stream at the forefront of the information technology explosion, many of the problems it looks at have been around for over 2000 years by great philosophers and scientists. What is the nature of thought? How do we reason? What is consciousness? How do we learn and use language? When we look at the same colour, do we experience it in the same way?
More recently, new challenges have arisen with respect to the neurophysiological basis of mental processes. How is our mind related to the billions of highly interconnected neurons in our brains? The advancement in the design of computers and computation has also brought new questions. Is the brain a computer? Is it possible for computers to think and have emotions just like human beings?
How do we study our mind?
Seeing an object in the street, recognizing it as a cat, planning how to take a photograph of this cat without letting it know and finally telling your friends that you were scratched by this cat can easily be accomplished by the majority of people. In fact, this is not as simple as we may think. All these activities, or cognitive activities, involve trillions of firings and computations among neurons. The study of Cognitive Science attempts to explain the mechanism behind such intelligent behaviour.
No single school of thought or discipline can establish a promising framework and explanation of how our mind works. The joint support from approaches practiced in different domains of knowledge is necessary. Experts studying Cognitive Science are generally equipped with a wide range of knowledge: cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and some other disciplines. Neurology enables us to look into the functions of our brains; the use of experiments demonstrates different variables which potentially affect our cognitive activities; computational modelling of intelligent behaviours provides hints of how our mind operates; the understanding of classical theories of the mind serves the basis to synthesize empirical findings from different approaches.
Why study Cognitive Science?
The importance of cognitive science is being increasingly recognized all over the world. Cognitive science departments and research centres can be found in top universities. Cognitive science is a useful subject because:
- Training of thinking skills - Cognitive science involves many different disciplines, such as psychology, linguistics, computer science, philosophy, statistics, and neuroscience. Being trained to deal with knowledge from different subjects systematically and critically, a good sense of reasoning is therefore developed. This skill is a powerful tool in preparing positions in the academy, commerce and other enterprise.
- IT and design - Cognitive science looks at how the mind processes information. Obtaining knowledge of information processing in our mind and computational architectures allows us to build computer interfaces with high degree of accessibility and usability. This can help us design electronic and other devices which are more user-friendly.
- Artificial Intelligence - If we can explain how human beings think and reason, we might be able to build intelligent computers that work for us. Knowing how human beings see the world might lead to special cameras that can recognize faces and other objects. Understanding how we store and retrieve information can also help us create better databases.
- Education - Our mind has an amazing learning capacity, as can be seen in the way children learn new facts and new languages. Understanding this process will improve our educational system and allow us to help those with learning difficulties.
- Helping people - Many people suffer from neurological problems such as autism, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, to name just a few. If we understand better how the brain works, we might be able to come up with ways to treat these illnesses.
- Understanding the mind - Although scientists have discovered a lot of new knowledge about the universe, we still do not know how the human mind works. The nature of the mind is the last big scientific frontier. Cognitive science is a collaborative effort to solve this ultimate mystery.
Cognitive science is really fun!!!
In Cognitive Science, we study all kinds of mental phenomena such as language, reasoning, emotions, free will, and consciousness. They often involve difficult but very intriguing cases which are studied by scientists.
For example, in 1848, someone called Phineas Gage was helping to build a railway when there was an explosion. An iron bar went through his head but amazingly enough Gage survived. However, his personality changed completely as a result. Before, he was a hardworking, well-liked and sober individual. Afterwards, he was a foul-mouthed drunkard who could not keep to any single job. It turns out that the damage to a specific front part of his brain changed his identity. Although this is a sad story, it reveals some very interesting things about the mind. First, the brain and the mind are not completely independent. Changing one of them can change the other. Studies like these tell us that different parts of the brain have different functions, and by understanding how the brain works, we might be able to understand the nature of the mind.
For a different example, click on the image link on the right. You will see a picture with shapes that seem to move. But actually this is an illusion created by your brain and the image is a stationary one. Isn't this amazing? These cases of optical illusions can actually tell us a lot about how our minds work. But be careful when you look at the picture. You might feel dizzy! (Acknowledgement: The picture is taken from http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/rotsnake.gif, by Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University.)
Additional resources
Want to read more about cognitive science? Here are some useful sources.- A brief but good discussion of cognitive science from Berkeley.
- What is cognitive science (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- The HKU Cogsci ebook - an online web site used in our first year introductory course.
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