What is cognition?

What is the mind? It can be quite a polarizing question, yet it is also an enduring one, a debate which may never end.

So instead, another question: What is cognition?

How do we understand the neuronal hardware that we can see and study, and how does it impact our experience of, and behavior in, the world?

Let’s start with the following, from the foundational text Cognitive Psychology, by Ulric Neisser:

There certainly is a real world of trees and people and cars and even books, and it has a great deal to do with our experience of these objects. However, we have no direct, immediate access to the world, nor to any of its properties.¹

Trippy, right? We don’t really have a way to understand what our experience of the world would be like without a brain. Makes me think about a kind of inverse Descartes…

Luckily we don’t have to go there in this post. Back to Neisser:

Whatever we know about reality has been mediated, not only by the organs of sense but by complex systems which interpret and reinterpret sensory information. The activity of the cognitive systems results in — and is integrated with — the activity of muscles and glands that we call “behavior.”²

So all we can ever really know about the world stems from sensory input and the way that input is processed by our nervous system. Cognition is:

[…] all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. […] Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition.³

Cognition deals with processing of knowledge and information. At first it may be tempting to equate cognition with the mind, and in some ways that would be correct. Cognition is one of the things humans are capable of doing best, even going so far as to create tools which assist and modify our cognitive abilities.

What interests me about cognitive science is its interdisciplinary nature. Whereas the more “classical sciences” have sought to explain an object of interest in isolation, cognitive science has shown me that often times this way of studying nature provides an incomplete explanation of reality. By doing the opposite, by agreeing from the beginning that often it is difficult to draw a perfect boundary between two seemingly disparate subjects (cognition and design, for example), it turns into a study of relationships, instead of subjects in and of themselves. By studying these relationships, we come to learn all of these fascinating things about our disposition as humans living in an inseparable, and very real world.

My plan, through this blog, is to observe the world through the lens of metacognition (thinking about cognition). To look at the ways cognition shapes the design of our world, and likewise how the designed world shapes our cognition. The goal is to be better informed about our relationship with the world, and to better take care of the world, which is the only home we’ve ever known.

Footnotes

1. Cognitive Psychology, page 3 ↩

2. Ibid, page 3 ↩

3. Ibid, page 4 ↩