Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science (CogS) is an extremely fascinating and rapidly developing area of human knowledge. CogS is to answer questions about the thing people are interested in most of all - about themselves. The questions are: how do we perceive, process and transmit information? And how do we learn?
It may be considered a specific part of psychology. A rather independent part, though. One special aspect is it's close relation to computer science and machine learning. Not just to understand, but also to imitate the processes similar to human thinking in computer algorithms - there are still many things computers cannot do, while for humans they are so obvoius we don't even think of them. On the other hand, if we construct an algorithm that performs close to human on certain tasks, it can yield a good model for what actually happens.
I was lucky to participate in MLSS 2010 last week, where I got an introduction to the field via several amazing talks by Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths, Chris Watkins and others.
Personally, I believe that knowing how the brain works, we could not only construct better computer systems, but also improve the way we learn and teach.