Brain Health Blog

By Gregory Kellett, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at SFSU and UCSF, and science writer for Lumos Labs.

What exactly is cognition and how does it work? Here we will attempt to outline and explain some of the basic concepts involved with the inner workings of your head.

Cognition literally means “to know”.  Knowledge can be thought of as memories formed from the manipulation and assimilation of raw input , perceived via our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.

Using knowledge to direct and adapt action towards goals is the foundation of the cognitive process. Past experiences and trends inform our sense of what the future might hold and help us to act accordingly.

Take a yearning for pizza for example… Cognition encompasses everything from knowing/remembering what pizza is (and that you like it)…to realizing that you are hungry and making plans to have it delivered.

In order for our finite minds to make sense of the near infinite details of our surroundings however,  a large part of cognition involves the organization of our thoughts into associations or categories. These might range from “things one might find in a kitchen” to “people I think are cute”. Simple symbols such as the word “face” are used to group more complex learned associations such as those between noses, lips, eyes and smiles.

Although important, these “cognitive categories” are overlapping and not always clearly distinct…so keep this in mind as we break down the concept of cognition itself into some of its more widely recognized pieces.

The words perception, attention, memory and executive function are one way of divvying up the processes involved in how we think. All of the above will be involved throughout your journey towards satisfying that pizza craving. Let’s use some specific points to illustrate their role in the overall process of attaining such a dinner goal.

Perception, in this case, of the fact that you feel hungry and that there is no food in the fridge, is what gets the whole process moving. It involves seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and or smelling your surroundings, allowing you to respond appropriately.

Memory plays the obvious role of storing the name of your favorite pizza parlor. It also enables you to dial the number given by the operator and give directions to your house. Some different components include short term/working memory, long-term memory and subconscious/implicit knowledge.

Executive Function enables the planning of logistics, such as timing the pizza delivery to coincide with the arrival of your scrabble buddies.  Improvising (guessing what toppings everyone will enjoy), problem solving (figuring how much to tip) and controlling impulses (not ruining your appetite by eating a whole bag of Doritos while waiting) also come into play here.

Attention processes kick in by having you shift your focus from reading the Sunday funnies to answering the door upon hearing that long awaited knock. They also help in multi-tasking a slice of pizza with figuring out how to nail that triple word score all while ignoring the heckling antics of your so called “friends”.

Again, although separated for the purposes of our discussion here, it is the interplay of all of these systems working simultaneously which makes up the process of cognition; allowing us to adapt to our surroundings and take action towards obtaining our goals.