Overview

Most cognitive scientists think that, in some sense, the mind is organized into cognitive sub-systems. But there are many different ways of thinking about how this organization might work in practice. We looked at some of these in the last chapter. Fodor's modularity doctrine is one example. The massive modularity thesis a rather different one. But, if we accept the general picture of the mind as organized into cognitive sub-systems, two questions immediately arise.

1. How do the individual cognitive sub-systems work?

2. How are the individual sub-systems connected up with each other?

In Chapters 6–10 we have been focusing on the first question. In this chapter we turn to the second question. What we are interested in now is how the individual sub-systems fit together – or, to put it another way, what the wiring diagram of the mind looks like.

This question is more tricky than initially appears. Neuroanatomy is a very good place to start in thinking about the organization of the mind, but neuroanatomy can only take us so far. The wiring diagram that we are looking for is a cognitive wiring diagram, not an anatomical one. We are trying to understand how information flows through the mind, and whether certain types of information processing are carried out in specific brain areas. This takes us beyond anatomy, because we certainly cannot take it for granted that cognitive functions map cleanly onto brain areas.