Cognitive science has become a major development for the study of the mind/brain. Its origins date back to Descartes and his belief that knowledge of the external world is filtered through some form of representation. Today, cognitive science aims to understand the brain's psychological and linguistic processes as computational systems which manipulate representation. As a science of cognition, it investigates all our cognitive abilities such as perception, memory, emotion, language and learning, bringing together the work of psychologists, neuroscientists, computer scientists,...

When people confabulate, they make an ill-grounded claim that they honestly believe is true. There have been countless fascinating examples of confabulatory behaviour - people falsely recalling events from their childhood, the subject who was partially blind but insisted he could see, the amputee convinced that he retained all his limbs, to the patient who believed that his own parents had been replaced by imposters. Though confabulations can result from neurological damage, they can also appear in perfectly healthy people. Yet, how can confabulators so often appear to be of sound mind, yet...

Can consciousness and the human mind be understood and explained in sheerly physical terms? Materialism is a philosophical/scientific theory, according to which the mind is completely physical. This theory has been around for literally thousands of years, but it was always stymied by its inability to explain how exactly mere matter could do the amazing things the mind can do. Beginning in the 1980s, however, a revolution began quietly boiling away in the neurosciences, yielding increasingly detailed theories about how the brain might accomplish consciousness. Nevertheless, a fundamental...