"What is cognitive science, anyway?"

A lot of people ask me this question, when I tell them this is what I want to do in the future (hopefully in graduate school). Cognitive science is very interdisciplinary; it's a combination of all the different studies about the mind. It includes things like psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science. In fact, its breadth is what caught my interest, because I noticed it was a combination of a lot of majors that I had interest in, but couldn't choose from.

There were a lot of areas within cog sci that I wanted to explore, but I can't do them all at once! Right now I'm going to start helping with research about the neural basis of language, so I'm excited about that.

Here are some specific questions in cognitive science that I am personally very curious about: (* for the ones I'm especially interested in)

MEMORY, OBJECT AND FACE RECOGNITION, PROTOTYPE THEORY

How are objects reprsented? How can we quickly identify one object from another?

* How are faces represented? Does our brain analyze a face feature by feature, or does it look through templates of entire faces? Why can humans distinguish and recognize individual faces so quickly, almost immediately? Why don't we have to search through a "database" of all the faces we know to make a positive (or negative, even) match? How is it that we can even very quickly recognize the backs of peoples heads, when we can't pick out distinguishing features from that perspective?

What do we know about place cells? (There has been a lot of research done on this already, I just need to look into it more.) In experiments, rats that learned races were found to have specific neurons corresponding to specific places in the maze. And when they slept, these neurons would become active, in the order that the rat went through the maze. Apparently these rats were going back through the maze in their dreams. Isn't that cool?

Why is autobiographical memory so strong? Why can we so easily remember things we have experienced only once in our life when we forget other information we see all the time? (Probably an emotional aspect)

Why do we forget dreams so easily? (Sometimes just in the process of waking up, even) Even if it's a matter of it not being in long-term memory yet, why can I remember what I had for breakfast (which I care about much less) better than what dream I had as I woke up?

* How are memories represented in the brain? We know it's not a single neuron, but rather entire networks of neurons spread throughout the entire cortex. But neurons are all-or-none (basically binary) and they don't store information (but I should look into long term potentiation and stuff), only transmit. So how is it possible for even a network of neurons to store memories over time, like a computer's hard disk?

* Furthermore, how is that that the memories stored are meaningful? The information stored on hard disk is only 0's and 1's, but a computer can display all sorts of meaningful output. Yet, the output only has meaning because we have designed and interpreted it that way, not because the computer has decided that something is meaningful and shown it to us as such.

LANGUAGE

* How is language represented in the brain? Why can children learn language so much more easily than adults? How is language learning in children different from the way adults learn language? Can an adult learn a language fluently enough to not have to translate from his/her primary language first when communicating?

* How can a brain understand metaphor? Embodiment theory says it is possible because language is directly related to how we experience through our body, but what about metaphors that don't involve a human body? Example: comparing the white foam of waves to rushing horses, a la Lord of the Rings. How did language evolve, or has it always been innate?

Why do certain kinds of music elicit certain kinds of emotional responses? Are there physical aspects of music that correspond directly to the physical aspects of emotion? Does music have a metaphorical explanation the language has been proposed to?

How closely connected are thought and language? Is all thought propositional? Clearly we can have images or emotions that don't come in words, but does this count as actual thought? What about thoughts we have that we can't seem to describe in words?

* CONSCIOUSNESS

What is the neural basis for consciousness? Can this ever be fully explained?

Do animals have language and consciousness?

Is reductionism really the way to go? Is the mind truly reducible completely to physical neural processes? Is it the same as a computer? Can a computer be fully conscious in the way a human is conscious?

Related literature I hope to eventually read about these areas: