"The bottom line is, we're a bunch of blind men searching for a black cat in a dark room. You grab at anything you can get," says Jonathan D. Cohen, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "We are trying very hard to make the best of the tools we have in order to make headway on a very complex and challenging problem." To understand human consciousness, researchers in formerly disparate fields have to effectively communicate with each other. "The real key is the interaction of disciplines," Cohen says.
Cohen works with neural networks, currently a hot topic in cognitive science. Neural networks are mathematical models of how a group of neurons responds to an input. Neural networks are considered successful descriptions of how the brain functions--at least at an elementary level--when they can reproduce the correct output. These neural networks, although conceived of on a mathematical and ...
