Welcome to our blog. The cognitive revolution in neuroscience has been underway for some time, but it has only recently begun to gain momentum. The field which emerges is called “cognitive neuroscience.”

One of the challenges faced by cognitive neuroscience is that of the gestalt: how do we understand something which appears to be more than the sum of its parts by studying those parts? There are many possible answers to this question. An important one is to study not only the parts, but also their connections (i.e. causal relationships). This is the contribution of neural network models and graph theory when guided by neuro-anatomical and neuro-physiological studies.

A colleague whose research deals exclusively with the workings of the "parts" has often asked, “How can we ever understand how to get from understanding a single cell to understanding cognition?” Part of the mission of this blog is to document how this cognitive revolution in neuroscience attempts to answer that very question.

About the title: Neurevolution

Is it NeurEvolution? Perhaps NeuRevolution? The "Neur" is, of course, in reference to neuron, the basic functional cellular unit of the brain which is thought to be essential for mental function. We remain agnostic as to whether the title refers to either the evolution or revolution of neuroscience, since both denote change. The purpose of this blog is chronicling the great changes taking place in neuroscience due to the profound issues raised by cognitive science. This process is a revolution in that it is causing great change in a short period of time, and it is evolution in the sense that it is an emergent self-organizing process that each of us can only contribute to, not control.

About the blog authors

The authors are currently in the Ph.D. program in Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh. They both carry out research at the intersection of neuroscience and psychology (i.e. cognitive neuroscience). The authors are also enrolled at the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (a joint program at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh).

Michael W. Cole is a fourth year Ph.D. student. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 2003 with a B.A. degree in Cognitive Science. His research mainly involves the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity in humans during higher level cognitive tasks. He is interested in computational modeling and other techniques allowing for a greater understanding of the neural basis of cognition. Particular issues of interest include the neural basis of semantic representation, the neural basis of working memory and attention, the emergence of complex cognition from network dynamics, and the nature of cortical functional and anatomical organization.

Patryk A. Laurent is a fifth year Ph.D. student who graduated from the University of Virginia in 2001 with a B.A. in Cognitive Science. His research focuses on using eye-movement tracking and reinforcement learning modeling to understand how reward influences future action. Part of this research investigates how information from different parts of the brain — such as sight areas, sound areas, and language areas, influence moment-to-moment decisions about where to look next. He is especially interested in the area of cognitive neuroscience research that studies the relationship between eye-movements and one's focus of attention.