Preface

Daniel J. Levitin

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 life-
times 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 fun-
damental laws of chemistry, biology, and physics; the structure of space-time,
theoriginsoftheuniverse.Wehaveplausibletheoriesabouttheoriginsand
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
lifecomestobewhatitis.
There are scientists from nearly every field engaged in this pursuit. Physicists
try to understand how physical matter can give rise to that ineffable state we
call consciousness, and the decidedly nonphysical ‘‘mind stuff’’ that Descartes
and other philosophers have argued about for centuries. Chemists, biologists,
and neuroscientists join them in trying to explicate the mechanisms by which
neurons communicate with each other and eventually form our thoughts, mem-
ories, emotions, and desires. At the other end of the spectrum, economists study
how we balance choices about limited natural and financial resources, and
anthropologists study the influence of culture on thought and the formation of
societies. So at one end we find scientists studying atoms and cells, at the other
end there are scientists studying entire groups of people. Cognitive psycholo-
gists tend to study the individual, and mentalsystemswithin individual brains,
although ideally we try to stay informed of what our colleagues are doing. So
cognition is a truly interdisciplinary endeavor, and this collection of readings is
intended to reflect that.

Why Not a Textbook?

This book grew out of a course I took at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology (MIT) in 1975, from Susan Carey and Merrill Garrett (with occasional
guest lectures by Mary Potter), and courses I taught at the University of Ore-