notes from preliminary meeting with Sandy

Some of the questions that I might want to explore for the project:
- what do cognitive science and neuroscience mean by modularity?
- is there a mismatch in granularity between them?
- is there a conceptual misunderstanding between them?
(the idea is that they mean different things by modularity and the different ideas might not match up)

one hunch about this is that many cognitive scientists, like Fodor, talk about functional modularity, while neuroscientists might talk more about structural or physiological modularity. I don't know if either part of that is true yet, but it's a starting hunch.

some more possible questions:
- why do we need modularity?
(arguments for how evolution has to happen in hierarchical steps for it to feasible at all)
- what does modularity do for us?
(not sure what Sandy meant by this exactly)
- how is this idea of modularity (from cognitive science and psychology) mapped onto the brain? or how could it be?

a few new vocabulary terms:
epigenetics = how the expression of genes is affected by environmental factors
evo-devo = (evolutionary-developmental biology) how evolution and development interact

this evo-devo thing sounds really interesting and like one of the things i'm interested in but didn't know the name for, but for some reason Sandy was directing me away from the papers about it. not because it's crap, but because it wasn't what I was interested in, she thought. Maybe she's right about that, with respect to this project. Maybe she doesn't realize that that's what I want to look at because my articulation of the idea consisted mainly of hand-waving. Or maybe I still don't really know what it means. I scanned some chapters from the evo-devo section of the book we were looking through anyway, so that i can see what they're about and maybe figure this out.