Body and Cognition

This semester I am teaching a class at CCA called "Body and Cognition" - the syllabus is below. I have also enrolled as a distance scholar in the MPHIL ART program at Goldsmiths - I will be dividing my time between the two.

Body and Cognition

“Body and Cognition is a tour of topics in cognitive science - from vision and language to memory, learning and consciousness. The course has a special focus on the relationship between mind and body. Students will learn some of the core underlying concepts of cognitive science, and also practice data collection and analysis.”

Week 1 (9 September) Introduction. Decartes and the Mind/Body problem. Dualism, materialism. Doubt as a methodology.

Week 2 (16 September) Language 1: Phonology and Morphology. The Devanagari writing system.Low level language processing.

Week 3 (23 September) Language 2. Higher level language processing. Grammars. Mental lexicons. Syntax and semantics. Mentalese.

Week 4 (30 September) Psychology 1: Experiment design. Between-subject versus within-subject. Central tendency. Spread. Collecting data.

Week 5 (7 October) Psychology 2: P-scores and the null hypothesis. Central limit theorem. Analyzing results.

Week 6 (14 October) Machines 1. Software. Algorithms. Incompleteness, uncertainty and the Enlightenment. The Turing Machine. The halting problem. Sort and search algorithms.

Week 7 (21 October) Machines 2. AI: The Turing Test. Machine Intelligence. Eliza. Searle’s Chinese Room. Logic and knowledge representation.

Week 8 (28 October) The Brain. Neurons, ganglions, axons, brain structure. Connectionism.

Week 9 (4 November) Vision 1. The eye and the visual cortex. Illusions. Marr’s Three Levels.

Week 10 (11 November) Vision 2. Face recognition. Change blindness. Visual memory. Vision and art. Non-photorealistic rendering and HDR.

Week 11 (18 November) Information and Memory. What is information? Information theory. Redundancy. Memory. The hippocampus. Long and short term memory.

Week 12 (25 November) Thanksgiving break.

Week 13 (2 December) Emotions. Feelings. Affect. Emotional models. The limbic system and the Amygdala.

Week 14 (9 December) Consciousness. Philosophical approaches to consciousness. Bandwidth. Attention.

Week 15 (16 December) Final class: Special topic (tbd).