ABSTRACT
The quest for the neurobiological basis of cognition is enjoying new status, due in large part to functional neuroimaging, which has provided insight into the neurobiological basis of human memory and consciousness. With this pursuit comes a question as to how to best map these cognitive operations onto the brain. One implicit assumption has been that there should be a 1-to-1 mapping of psychological constructs to the brain. The brain should mirror the spatial arrangement of psychological constructs. It is easy to see this expressed in modern neuroimaging, where specific cognitive functions are attributed to activated brain regions. Most psychological theories consider memory processes to be distinct from sensation, perception, and action, and so imaging studies attempt to isolate memory functions by keeping other processes constant across tasks and changing memory demands. The reasoning is that the greater memory demand puts proportionally greater demands on memory regions, which should distinguish themselves from the brain regions by becoming more active. This approach has been the target of much criticism, but it does seem to be a reasonable starting point for the exploration of mind-brain relationships. The mapping is made difficult, however, because neurophysiology is not taken into account. Inconsistencies may arise due to some characteristic of the nervous system. If we were to take account of the properties of the nervous system in the study of cognition, what features need to be considered? The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that two dominant features, connectivity and plasticity, are key to the understanding of how cognition results from the operations of the brain.
