Jason Wells

This evening I discovered my blog was down. I got the 500 error “Error establishing a database connection.” Uh oh. My recent efforts have produced a 10x gain in traffic, but that was starting from a fairly low baseline. It shouldn’t have caused any problems. I ssh’d in and took a look, but didn’t see anything obviously amiss. Other sites of ours hosted on the same Linux instance were fine. The logs weren’t informative.

Then Heather, who is awesome, swooped in and fixed the problem. Hostmonster’s over-the-phone support was useless, as expected, murmuring indistinct, ignorant noises about upgrades having perhaps corrupted databases. Anyway, she did a backup of the site (thankfully, that worked), built a new database, restored, and we’re back. Not only that, but as part of the bargain, the site now seems to be a bit faster! Nice.

If you tried visiting during the downtime–I presume it was a few hours in duration–apologies.

How cool is this. MIT Open Courseware offers a class called Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. It is an entire course geared around Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

This is one of the greatest books I’ve ever read; it’s a true masterpiece. I first encountered it in high school. Ostensibly it’s a gorgeous web interconnecting art, mathematics and music, but that’s actually instrumental to the book’s true purpose. Quoth Wikipedia:

Hofstadter has emphasized that GEB is not about mathematics, art, and music but rather about how cognition and thinking emerge from well-hidden neurological mechanisms.

And now MIT offers a free class geared around this book, using it as a kind of textbook, bracketed with a syllabus and class notes in PDF. All this for free. Wow. Props to the instructors, Justin Curry and Curran Kelleher, and to MIT for providing this to the world gratis.

Edit: People have expressed doubt about this. This is real. I’m not kidding. Try it yourself.

Edit 2: Looks like they fixed it. Aww.

File this with another surprising search query of late. Now that is a catchy title! But if I were Saturday Night Live doing an ego search, I’d be pissed.

IMDB’s libertine search engine.

As I embark on intellectual adventures in cognitive science, as I intend to, I begin with the basics. The first question I tackled, and one I’m often asked, is: “What is cognitive science?” It doesn’t get much more basic than that. Even so, there is enough confusion about this to make it a very good question for anyone to ask.

I'm so confused.

Cognitive science is, of course, the science of cognition. Cognition is just another word for thinking–one that carries specific implications about how thinking happens. At this point it’s evident that we think with our brains, and presumably cognitive science is the study of this. So it purports to be, too, although there’s a whole lot more to it. You could see it as the study of mind and mental processes, in other words, of the mind and its operations; and since the mind is what the brain does, it’s not unreasonable to think that cognitive science would primarily study neural function.

Here’s where things get a little whack. There’s already another field for studying brains: neuroscience. Neuroscience is not cognitive science–although it is sometimes considered one of the “cognitive sciences.” In fact, not all neuroscientists seem to be even interested in cognitive science. So I wondered: how do they relate? For example, what is a question one discipline would address that the other wouldn’t?

I’ve asked several neuroscientists and a neurophilosopher this question directly; none could say! I even raised the question on Quora. No satisfactory answers there either. I began to wonder: given the billions spent on research into the brain, the mind and psychology every year, how could this be?

Then it gets more fun. Turns out there’s something else called cognitive neuroscience. When I discovered this, my initial reaction was, are you kidding me? But cognitive science is not cognitive neuroscience, despite the two having almost identical names. The latter is a subfield of neuroscience; the former isn’t. Yet the two definitely relate. For example, the Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology Lab at UCSD is part of the UCSD Cognitive Science department (which is considering my Ph.D. application right now).

And then it gets even better. There’s something else called computational neuroscience. Since cognitive science draws deeply from computer science (it had a major artificial intelligence research program for decades), you might at first think this is simply a synonym for cognitive science. But it’s not. It is the study of the brain as an information processor. It has multiple touchpoints to cognitive science, but again, one goes to places the other doesn’t, and vice versa.

So, what the fuck is going on? I’ve spent the past few months trying to clear this up for myself. Here’s what I’ve got so far.

Neuroscience is a life science. It’s about the nervous system, which includes the brain. It’s not really about thinking at all, although obviously it has huge relevance. A neuroscientist works with neurons, perhaps seeing how they can be affected by chemicals or sensing their electrical activity to get a grasp of neural functions. A neuroscientist might study what the brain does when a person thinks about adding two numbers, but not how a computer does the same thing, even though (I would argue) both are comparable forms of cognition, despite having very different realizations. And I doubt a neuroscientist would investigate anything cognitive that can’t be reduced to a neurological explanation. For example, the thing we call friendship is something mental that is maintained by neural functionality, but you can’t explain friendship in those terms for an individual brain. Friendship is social; it emerges from the interaction of at least two brains, and each may have very different things going on. Friendship can’t appear on an fMRI scan.

Here’s another clue. A cognitive scientist might very well study psychological and social relationships between different people without looking into neurology at all. I don’t believe a neuroscientist would do something like this unless it were to inform a specific inquiry into brain function. A cognitive scientist may even study how people and computers orchestrate themselves cognitively; this is in fact a topic of cognitive science known as distributed cognition.

So as best I can make out, cognitive science isn’t strictly reducible to neuroscience for two big reasons: one, it takes on phenomena that emerges beyond the bounds of the neurology of an individual brain; and two, it can encompass cognitive phenomena exhibited in intelligent machines, i.e. computers, which don’t have neurons.

At this point it seems like the best way to make sense of all this is as follows:

• Cognitive science is the study of the phenomena of cognition in the world, natural or artificial, leveraging insights from the following three fields and others, such as computer science, psychology, linguistics and even philosophy;
• Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system, not artificial systems and not necessarily even cognition;
• Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the phenomena of cognition in the brain, that is, the biological underpinnings of thinking; and
• Computational neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system’s information processing abilities, cognitive or otherwise.

So there it you have it. The fields all interact in different ways and overlap considerably, and I didn’t even address other closely related fields like cognitive psychology or philosophy of mind. I take this complicated muddle to be the product of the deep confusion that exists about the mind today. All the same, the progress in this space is beyond warp speed, which creates new chaos and confusion at least as fast as discoveries and advances clear things up. In short, the “cognitive sciences” are in a state of total revolution… and revolutions get messy. There’s so much creativity in this space that these disciplines, with their distinct intellectual interests and traditions, either blend, separate or directly contradict one another in countless ways that constantly change.

I really like revolution. I think it’s a very exciting time to study cognition. There is clearly much to be done.

Note: This is the 7th (and last) in a series of entries in my Glacier National Park travel photo journal. If this is new to you, please start with the first one for the full story of our adventures.

September 12th. This became an unplanned “break” day. The night before, Heather and I considered a morning hike, but we’d been all over the place the day before and this morning just wanted to relax. Our campsite was appealing: sheltered with tall trees and offering a great view of the mountains. So we lit a campfire, made coffee and breakfast, and just hung out at camp. I’d been reading the book Wicked now and then for the past few months and read the last two-thirds of it in camp. We took naps now and then. This is part of the experience. Allowing yourself to take a break is wholesome. We were fully recharged by the next day, ready for new adventures.

September 13th. This would be our last day in Glacier National Park itself; we were ready to hit the road and discover new things on the return route. The air had taken a new autumnal chill; looked like our timing was good. We struck camp and took Going-to-the-Sun Road back to West Glacier, departing from the same park entrance we took in.

Returning west on Going-to-the-Sun Road. A foggy morning.

And then, where to? Anywhere we wanted. We had time to explore the world outside of Glacier. I took us through Flathead National Forest, a giant running along the eastern side of the lake. A slender country highway cut through the thick, gorgeous forest.

We continued south and eventually arrived at Bigfork. It was evening, and at sunset we had dinner on the patio at a small restaurant right on the lake. After we found a little motel, got a room and unpacked our things. After we settled in we walked over to Whistling Andy, a local microdistillery just across the country highway. We’d never been to one before; in fact I was unfamiliar with the idea of craft distilling at all. But there is a whole community analogous to craft brewing. I hear it’s a much harder business to get into though; there’s a lot more regulatory red tape.

In the front of the distillery was a bar serving their own liquor: rum, vodka, gin and (surprise) moonshine. A girl tended bar and made us a few sample cocktails. We chatted with a couple of the locals. In the back, behind glass doors, was the actual distillery. After we had a few drinks, we met the owner. He came out, introduced himself and gave us a personal tour of the distillery. It seemed they were just growing out of being a garage-scale operation into a true small business (with all of three employees). Business was expanding rapidly; they didn’t really have room for their inventory, and had palettes of liquor wherever they could find room. They had just received a brand-new copper still they’d had built in Kentucky. It was a beautiful machine, absolutely gleaming.

They were friendly folks and the spirits weren’t bad. We left with a bottle of the moonshine.

September 14th. It was quiet morning in Bigfork. We ate breakfast in the downtown area. This part of town has a traditional Old West feel: a single broad avenue lined with wooden and brick storefronts packed next to one another.

After breakfast we continued south through Flathead National Forest. This route was a find; it’s truly beautiful there, and worth the periodic construction slowdowns. Several hours later we entered Idaho. Once again, the boundless boring flatness. Heather read to me to keep me awake. A few hours later we were at the Utah border. Around there I hit a 5-foot diameter tumbleweed at 90mph. About a third of it stayed wedged in the grille and windshield of the van.

That evening we made our way to Salt Lake City. Our hotel was downtown. It had been a long day of driving and Heather and I were both tired. We had dinner at a very nice Italian restaurant. We’d discover that SLC has plenty of good dining.

September 15. Checked out and left the hotel. Today we would spend exploring Salt Lake City. Neither of us had really been there before; I’d only been in the airport for a layover once. I was curious to see what this unique place–the largest Mormon-majority city in the world–would be like.

After all the driving, I wanted to see if we could get around SLC without the van. (Plus, the city has a really peculiar street naming scheme that I had already grown tired of interpreting.) It turned out that they had in the last decade built a lightrail system known as TRAX. It’s very nice: inexpensive, clean, uncrowded and actually goes where you want to go. Very similar to the one in Portland. (Maybe one day the San Diego Trolley will be as good.) There was a TRAX station not far from our hotel, so we took it to Temple Square.

Temple Square is a Mormon religious complex at the very center of SLC; it’s the origin of the city as founded. It is dominated by the Salt Lake Temple. As non-Mormons, we were not allowed in the temple, but we saw it from the grounds, and there is a nearby visitor center that has a dollhouse-scale model of its interior, complete with kiosks for exploring interior panorama shots with narrated explanation.

We then took a look in the Assembly Hall, a nearby structure made from stone left over from the construction of the temple. This we could enter, and did, briefly. Not far from it are memorials to the Mormon exodus–truly a gripping story–and of couse the large dome of the Tabernacle.

It was a beautiful day. From Temple Square we walked (and rode) to the City Library. This was an amazing and wholly unexpected find. It’s a vast library that’s almost entirely transparent. There’s a huge glass-enclosed atrium, and the elevators are glass, almost Wonka-like; you can watch the lift mechanisms carry you up and down. There are spiral staircases throughout; one lets you take a look at a beehive installed at the library by a Boy Scout troop. It has a full green roof garden accessible via a huge, swooping ramp leading up from the main level outside, a graceful arc defining a vertical edge to the building. From up there is an unparalleled view of SLC. Besides the exceptional architecture, though, it’s a great library. The building is level after level absolutely loaded full of really interesting books presented in a very accessible way. There are lounge areas, areas dedicated to storytelling for children and even a ‘young adults’ section where only teenagers are allowed to sit. I even saw people doing art projects. This is a true gem, something that really impressed me about the city.

After exploring City Library, we went for lunch at the Red Iguana, a Mexican joint and local institution. It was a bit of a wild goose chase at first. The mapping app gave horrendous directions, leading us not to the restaurant, but to a fat guy at a corner instead, who helpfully explained that this wasn’t it. So we walked back to hotel to get the van. On the walk back we found more promising directions. The restaurant was awesome. No trip to SLC would be complete without a meal there.

From there I hunted for an access point to Great Salt Lake. I’d never seen it in person and felt if I didn’t, I’d regret it. I shouldn’t have worried. It was much harder to get to than it needed to be; there are a number of web sites that give bad directions and many miles between overpasses for turnarounds. And anyway, after all that effort, it was disappointing. The lake is ugly and gloomy, and the shores are slimy mud with hordes of insects and litter. Our access point happened to be at the old Saltair pavilion. Once upon a time it had been a grand resort, but now has degenerated into a grungy music venue. There’s a small gift shop that tries to cash in on the old days.

By mid-afternoon we were back on the road, heading south on the 15. We drove to Cedar City and stayed their for the night. There’s a decent sushi place there called Sweet Basil, but otherwise it’s an unremarkable place. Not a bad place to take a break from the road though.

September 16th. Our last day on the road. We left Cedar City in the early morning and made it to Vegas for lunch. From there I took the 15 straight on to San Diego and home.

Well, that’s it! Hope you enjoyed this photo journal of our trip. Thanks for reading.