About this book

There are few things more fascinating to study than the human mind. And few things that are more difficult to understand. Cognitive science is the enterprise of trying to make sense of this most complex and baffling natural phenomenon.

The very things that make cognitive science so fascinating make it very difficult to study and to teach. Many different disciplines study the mind. Neuroscientists study the mind's biological machinery. Psychologists directly study mental processes such as perception and decision-making. Computer scientists explore how those processes can be simulated and modeled in computers. Evolutionary biologists and anthropologists speculate about how the mind evolved. In fact, there are very few academic areas that are not relevant to the study of the mind in some way. The job of cognitive science is to provide a framework for bringing all these different perspectives together.

This enormous range of information out there about the mind can be overwhelming, both for students and for instructors. I have had direct experience of how challenging this can be, as Director of the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. The challenge is to give students a broad enough base while at the same time bringing home that cognitive science is a field in its own right, separate and distinct from the disciplines on which it draws. I set out to write this book because my colleagues and I have not yet found a book that really succeeds in doing this.