Quite reasonably, the editors’ charge was describing our most important contribution to psychology. Here, I draw morals for young people contemplating a career in psychological research.

Each scientist builds, through continued hard work and attention to detail, unique expertise and networks that elucidate several threads in the fabric of nature. Over a lifetime, these add up to a body of work. The first challenge budding young scientists face is settling on mysteries that are so interesting to them they want to spend their lives trying to explain them. Beginning as an undergraduate, my work has aimed at explaining how abstract concepts, such as infinity, life, matter, agent, cause, and others arise in the human mind.

Accounting for the human conceptual repertoire formidably challenges psychological science. Our genetic make-up and brains are remarkably similar to those of our nearest animal cousins, the great apes. Yet, we are the only animals that can ponder the causes and cures of cancer or of global warming, that can conceive orders of infinity – indeed, that can think any thoughts beyond the representational capacity of non-human animals. Moral 1. Find a scientific mystery that fascinates you. The mystery of human conceptual development structured my life's work.

As a biology major, my sophomore tutorial was taught by a postdoc working on bodily mechanisms that underlie biological clocks. What fascinated me was how scientists knew animals could tell time. My tutor guided me in reading the ethological literature of 1961: how omnivores learn what food to eat, how animals navigate, how infants recognize their mothers. At year's end, my tutor said, “Ethology IS a branch of biology, so you can do this kind of work as a biologist, but the future of biology is molecular biology. I believe that the deeper work on these kinds of issues will come from the new discipline of cognitive science, and highly recommend that you check it out.” Moral 2: Seek out good teachers, and follow their advice; good teachers have your interests at heart.

Junior year, I took a course on the nature of knowledge from three founders of cognitive science, George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Noam Chomsky.