WHO CONTROLS OUR LIFE? A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO COGNITIVE SCIENCE.

Introduction.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks until today, philosophers have been
questioning about the issue of who controls our life, from the Aristotelian theory of the
homunculus to the computational theory of mind defended by Pinker. And it’s not
surprising that most people lose sleep over this issue. Is there a little guy in our head
making decisions for us? Do we have free will? Are we an empty glass when we are born
waiting for society to fill it all? Tough questions, but maybe there is something that can
help us to extend our range of vision. Cognitive science could explain why and how
humans behave.

What is cognitive science, who works in it and why is it an important area of

knowledge?

Firstly, is necessary to understand what this is and what it is for. Cognition is

mental activity and, as its name suggest, refers to how people process the information
from the environment, transforming it into an actual behave (Smith & Kosslyn). This means
that if someone receive some stimulus (intern of from the environment), also called and
input, mind is going to process it producing an output that could be a specific behavior, like
when we are walking on the street and suddenly the smell of bread caresses our nose
(input) and then we feel hungry (output). This is like to say that mind works as a computer
processor. Stimulus passes through our senses and there is when the information is
processed, that is to say, everything we feel is interpreted and given a meaning; therefore,
as well as a computer needs something that capitalizes the information, mind too. It would
be wrong to assert that human mind works as a computer, but it is reasonable to say that
in some parts of the brain the information is processed in order to produce the right output
(Pinker).

Secondly, all of this is interesting but, what is the point of all this? Well, if cognition
is the processing of information, then Cognitive Scientists study basically how humans
interpret their daily life. This includes how and why we pay attention to certain things
instead others or how we interpret it, learn from it, how we communicate it, why we have
goals in our life, why we can say that a machine is intelligent, among other subjects like
decision making, motivation, emotions, consciousness, etc. It sounds almost like the life
itself, isn’t it? And as life is lived by everyone, this area of science is interdisciplinary and
every field contributes with its own perspective. Medicine, psychology, computer science,
biology, ethology, endocrinology, anthropology, sociology, even physics and electronics
sciences have provided insights for the development of the area.

As an example of this interdisciplinarity, is the study of how hormones affect our

way of thinking and behave. The Behavioral Ecology Journal published a study that claims
that both men and women are affected by the ovulatory cycle in mating behavior. Another
research provided by the university of St. Jerome in Canada, discovered that women in a
relationship sexually active feel more comfortable during their menses, and also feel more
interested in unconventional sexual activities. These two studies are examples of a same
issue seen from different perspective but with the same aim: to demonstrate how
hormones change human behavior.

Now that the roots of cognitive science have been planted, it’s time to talk about
what we do with all this information. If there is a lot of different fields contributing to this
area of knowledge, is because its results. Cognitive science has been a valuable source of
inputs for many other disciplines being able to apply them within their own field, as
Marketing, Economics, Human Resources, Psychology, Sports, Social Work, among other
disciplines whose main study object are humans.

An example of this, are Daniel Kahneman’s works about heuristics and biases.
Thanks to him, nowadays it is widely known that economic decisions aren’t made as the
traditional economy used to claim, but now we know that there are factors that influence in
our decision-making process like aversion to risk, the amount of options, blurred
probabilities, or even banal things like the weather, the distance or the simple capacity to
see what other people ordered to drink or how much they earn on their jobs.

Another example are the advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Scientist are
questioning about if brain works as a machine or if a machine can have same function as a
mind, and this is a main issue for Cognitive Scientists because, as I mentioned above,
cognition is about mental activity and mind works as a machine for information processing,
interpreting the inputs and making decisions on it (Meinhardt). Nowadays, scientists know
how brain computes the information and how this can be replicated into a machine by
creating algorithms in order to make it possible to learn from people behavior and, for
example, being able to know what people like to see first and post it on the top of their
social networks like Instagram or facebook.
Conclusion and final thoughts.

In conclusion, cognitive science is focused on explaining how people behave and

also how the mind works, studying the human mental processing, working on
interdisciplinary teams in order to find new insights and also producing valuable
knowledges so that other fields can apply them.

It’s not easy to summarize a whole area of science in some few pages; however,
this is the topic that every single day makes me wake up from my bed and start thinking
about why people behave the way they do. I hope with this short article that the reader can
know a little more about human cognition and specially know what this is all about,
because there are tons of material about cognition on the web and libraries, but
sometimes we only firstly need to see the whole picture before start get into details.
Besides, when somebody expresses himself briefly by trying to summarize what he knows
about any particular subject, he is challenging himself to clarify all the ideas that are sailing
free on his mind, so yes, I wrote this article for me, but I hope you have enjoyed it.

Works cited page and further readings.

Boden, M. A. (2008). Mind as machine: A history of cognitive science. Oxford: Clarendon

Press.

Havliček, J., Cobey, K. D., Barrett, L., Klapilová, K., & Roberts, S. C. (2015). The

spandrels of Santa Barbara? A new perspective on the peri-ovulation

paradigm. Behavioral Ecology,26(5), 1249-1260. doi:10.1093/beheco/arv064

Kahneman, D. (2015). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Meinhardt, E. (2015, December 11). Is cognitive science closer to computer science/AI or

is it closer to neuroscience/psychology? Retrieved April 29, 2018, from

https://www.quora.com/Is-cognitive-science-closer-to-computer-science-AI-or-is-it-

closer-to-neuroscience-psychology
Miller, G. A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: A historical perspective. Trends in Cognitive

Sciences,7(3), 141-144. doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(03)00029-9

Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: Norton.

Rempel, J., & Baumgartner, B. (2003). The Relationship Between Attitudes Towards

Menstruation and Sexual Attitudes, Desires, and Behavior in Women. Archives of

Sexual Behavior,32(2), 155-163. Retrieved from

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.465.8379&rep=rep1&type=p

df

Rescorla, M. (2015, October 16). The Computational Theory of Mind. Retrieved from

https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=computational-mind

Smith, E. E., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2014). Cognitive psychology: Mind and brain. Harlow

(Essex): Pearson.

Thagard, P. (1996, September 23). Cognitive Science. Retrieved from

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cognitive-science/