TTC Video – Introduction to Cognitive Science
Lecturer: Thad A. Polk, Ph.D. Professor, University of Michigan | Course No. 10360
In Introduction to Cognitive Science, Professor Thad A. Polk takes you on a fascinating tour of the latest discoveries in the relatively new field of cognitive science. The goal is nothing less than understanding every interaction working in the human brain to produce all forms of cognition. Computer scientists, engineers, linguists, physicians, psychologists, and more are all pursuing the mysteries of the most complex structure in the known universe: the human brain.
In 24 exciting lectures, Professor Polk will share dozens of the most challenging questions in cognitive science today: How do humans process language? How do we make decisions, and why do we so often regret them later? What are emotions, and why do we feel them? How does the brain affect our visual perception of the world? In this course, Professor Polk gives the latest, exciting answers for these questions, and many more.
Getting around the Black Box
- Psychologists. Beginning in the 1980s, research psychologists began using violation-of-expectation experiments with infants and young children, discovering that the children had a much deeper understanding of the world at an earlier age than we realized.
- Neurologists/Neurosurgeons. Scientists would like to know more about how the brain represents the sounds of human speech. Recent studies by neurosurgeons implanting electrodes in the left temporal lobes of epilepsy patients showed that specific populations of neurons respond to very specific sounds of human speech.
Join In the Experiments Yourself
- Expectations and Perception. We assume that we see the reality of the world around us, but that is just not the case. In this exercise, you’ll realize how significantly your expectations and assumptions influence what you see. Looking at a picture of dents and bumps on the side of a battleship, you’ll discover that your perception is controlled by your unacknowledged assumption that the light source is at the top of the picture. But even when you’re made aware of that assumption, it feels impossible to change that expectation.
- Vision and Perception. In this experiment, you’ll watch a ball moving across a screen, and you’ll notice a blank space where the ball disappears. You’ve discovered your blind spot in that eye, the place on your retina without any photoreceptors, the place where the optic nerve passes from the eye to the brain. But when you watch the same ball with stripes above and below, you don’t see a blind spot in the stripes. Why not? And what does that tell you about the role the brain plays in visual perception and conscious experience more generally?
When Things Go Wrong
As much as we might like to “tinker around” with the brain as if it were a regular physical machine, that’s just not possible with human beings. But sometimes, an accident or disease creates a specific change in the brain that scientists can study. The damaged brains of many such patients have led to profound changes in our understanding of the healthy brain and cognition. In this course, you will also learn about:
- Louis Victor Leborgne. At age 30, Leborgne suddenly lost his ability to speak, with the exception of one syllable. Despite that profound deficit, his mental and physical abilities seemed to be relatively normal. Based on the work of his physician, Paul Broca, the hypothesis that different functions were localized in different brain regions began to be taken much more seriously.
- Phineas Gage. Gage suffered a catastrophic injury when a piece of metal hit his head in an explosion, going through the left frontal lobe of his brain and out the top of his head. Amazingly, Gage survived, but was left with permanent brain damage. From this widely discussed case, scientists began to propose that the frontal lobes play a major role in personality, which has since been substantiated.
- “SM.” SM is a woman who was generally fearless due to an extremely rare genetic disorder that led to the deterioration of her brain’s amygdala. She also couldn’t recognize fear in other people, even though her other cognitive functions were fine. Scientists who worked with her were able to learn much more about the neural basis of emotion than had been known at the time, including the fact that the brain contains specialized circuits for fear and multiple fear pathways.
It’s all right that we haven’t answered all the questions yet. After all, cognitive science is trying to understand and model nothing less than the most sophisticated structure we know.
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