Sunday, October 23, 2011

Pay Attention to Basics

One thing I've always regretted in Cognitive Science is that I never kept my first book from Cog166. (I sold Proust Was A Neuroscientist, but bought it back - it's still my favorite!) I can't even remember what it was called, but I know that it is not the book currently used. I'll admit - it wasn't my favorite book. I was just an art major then, a sophomore in the fall of 2009, and it was a lot of vocabulary and concepts.

Although it wasn't the most interesting book, what I hear now I know I've heard of before. All of those concepts - Cartesian Dualism, connectionism, and others - we learned in that one book. More than once in my semesters have I wished I could look at that book again, to give myself a refresher on the subject we were going over in my cognitive science classes.

That first book was the opener for the major. It may have seemed like information overload, but it got us ready for what was about to come. Pay attention to those first lessons, the basics, because what we do in cognitive science is top-down processing - start at the big picture, then go down deep into the details.

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