On the marriage of cognition and neuroscience

This paper summarizes five major themes of discussion stemming from a recent workshop at the University of Toronto. The focus of the workshop was whether the phenomenology of cognition has a direct translation to the biological processes of the brain. The study of this translation is the goal of cognitive neuroscience. The themes were: (1) the influence of context on the understanding of brain function, in which regional activity may have different functional relevance depending on activity in the rest of the brain; (2) the merger of anatomy and function, emphasizing how interfacing at the systems level can have the potential to aid in the understanding of how anatomy constrains function; (3) the development of mathematical measures that take advantage of organizing principles of the nervous system; (4) the observation that the relation between "top-down" and "bottom-up" both neurally and conceptually could be better appreciated through a more principled mathematical approach; and (5) a central role for large-scale neural modeling to bridge basic neurophysiology and anatomy. Despite the consensus on these themes, there are several challenges for the field. Significant obstacles arise from the multidisciplinary nature of cognitive neuroscience, in which terms do not mean the same thing across disciplines (e.g., networks and systems). The imprecision of explanations for cognitive neuroscience data was also seen as a significant problem, suggesting that more principled attempts at explicit model specifications and prediction will be necessary for the field to develop.