As the last chapter of this book, we introduce some exciting and under-explored areas of future cognitive science. The first section reviews current large brain imaging databases elicited from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) movement. The second section focuses on the brain's resting state, called the default mode networks (DMN). The third section looks at the development of neuroprosthesis and how cognitive scientists can cooperate with interdisciplinary researchers in robotic engineering and brain--computer interfaces. The fourth section looks at cognitive science and the law, while the last section looks at self-driving vehicles.

In the preceding chapter, we investigated the physical production of speech sounds in terms of the articulatory mechanisms of the human vocal tract. That investigation was possible because of some rather amazing facts about the nature of language. When we considered the human vocal tract, we didn’t have to specify whether we were talking about a fairly large person, over 6 feet tall, weighing over 200 pounds, or about a rather small person, about 5 feet tall, weighing less than 100 pounds. Yet those two physically different individuals would inevitably have physically different vocal tracts, in terms of size and shape. In a sense, every individual has a physically different vocal tract. Consequently, in purely physical terms, every individual will pronounce sounds differently. There are, then, potentially millions of physically different ways of saying the simple word me.

In Chapter 9, we focused on referential meaning and the relationships between words. There are other aspects of meaning that depend more on context and the communicative intentions of speakers. In Gill Brown’s story, the American tourists and the Scottish boy seem to be using the word war with essentially the same basic meaning. However, the boy was using the word to refer to something the tourists didn’t expect, hence the initial misunderstanding. Communication clearly depends on not only recognizing the meaning of words in an utterance, but also recognizing what speakers mean by their utterances in a particular context. The study of what speakers mean, or “speaker meaning,” is called pragmatics.

However, we have not accounted for the fact that the three words in this phrase can only be combined in a particular sequence. We recognize that the phrase the lucky boys is a well-formed phrase in contemporary English, but that the following two “phrases” are not at all well-formed.

This chapter explores the recent shift in cognitive science toward the brain. The first two sections introduce the rudiments of brain anatomy and then explore Ungerleider and Mishkin's two visual systems hypothesis. Their work provides neural evidence of the two visual pathways (ventral and dorsal routes) in the brain from animal studies. The third section introduces the parallel distributed processing model of cognition introduced by Rumelhart, McClelland, and the PDP group. This model, and what came to be known as artificial neural networks, provide a powerful theoretical explanation of how the brain might process information. The last three sections are focused on early brain imaging studies on cognitive functions. First, Petersen and his colleagues used PET to detect how different brain regions respond to different stages of lexical processing. Next, Brewer and his colleagues localized the brain regions in memory tasks using event-related fMRI. Finally, Logothetis and his colleagues' exploration of the neural correlates of the BOLD signal suggests that fMRI signals could be a function of the input to neural regions rather than of neural firing.

The creation of new words in a language never stops and English is one language that is particularly fond of adding to its large vocabulary. Traditionally, we would check in a dictionary to be sure that we were using the right word, with correct spelling, but technological advances have provided us with programs that do the checking for us, or, even more insidiously, as in the situation described by Mary Norris above, try to choose the words for us. Unfortunately, at the moment, these programs do not seem to have any way of knowing if the words that are chosen are appropriate or if it is quite normal to send someone a communication out of the blue that reads “cute nachos.” In this chapter, we won’t solve the problem of inappropriate choice of words, but we will look in some detail at how those words came to be part of the language.

There are a lot of stories about creatures that can talk. We usually assume that they are fantasy or fiction or that they involve birds or animals simply imitating something they have heard humans say (as Terrence Deacon discovered was the case with the loud seal in the Boston Aquarium). Yet we believe that creatures can communicate, certainly with other members of their own species. Is it possible that a creature could learn to communicate with humans using language? Or does human language have properties that make it so unique that it is quite unlike any other communication system and hence unlearnable by any other creature? To answer these questions, we first look at some special properties of human language, then review a number of experiments in communication involving humans and animals.

The type of sociolinguistic variation described in Chapter 19 is sometimes attributed to cultural differences. It is not unusual to find aspects of language identified as characteristic features of African American culture or European culture or Japanese culture or multicultural communities. This approach to the study of language originates in the work of anthropologists who have used language as a source of information in the general study of “culture.”

This is a barely recognizable version of the Lord’s Prayer from over a thousand years ago. A later version is included for comparison at the end of the chapter, on page 289. The different versions provide a rather clear indication that the language of the “Englisc” has gone through substantial changes to become the English we use today. Investigating the features of older languages, and the ways in which they developed into modern languages, involves us in the study of language history and change, also known as philology.

In the preceding chapter, we focused on variation in language use found in different geographical areas. However, not everyone in a single geographical area speaks in the same way in every situation. As Captain Marryat learned, in the quotation above (cited in Mohr, 2013: 192), some individuals can have very specific views on socially appropriate language. We are also aware of the fact that people who live in the same region, but who differ in terms of education and economic status, often speak in quite different ways.