18/07/2022
What Is Cognition?
Cognition encompasses the scientific study of the human mind and how it
processes information; it focuses on one of the most difficult of all mysteries
that humans have addressed. The mind is an enormously complex system
holding a unique position in science: by necessity, we must use the mind to
study itself, and so the focus of study and the instrument used for study are
recursively linked. The sheer tenacity of human curiosity has in our own lifetimes brought answers to many of the most challenging scientific questions we
have had the ambition to ask. Although many mysteries remain, at the dawn of
the twenty-first century, we find that we do understand much about the fundamental laws of chemistry, biology, and physics; the structure of space-time,
the origins of the u niverse. We have plau sible theories abou t the origins and
nature of life and have mapped the entire human genome. We can now turn
our attention inward, to exploring the nature of thought, and how our mental
life comes to be what it is.
