These lecture notes are based on the subject Cognitive neuroscience from the year 2015-2016 While the historical background is mentioned in the literature, it will not be the focus of the exam. Rather, the methods of cognitive neuroscience are more important.Cognitive neuroscience is a broad field that targets explaining behavior in neural terms.The study of the relationship between the brain and the mind, which is at the base of cognitive neuroscience, dates back to ancient Greece. According to Descartes (17th century), the mind and the body are separate entities, which interact in a specific structure in the brain (which is not important for this course). This interaction is problematic, and this was addressed by Damasio, who studied traumatic injuries and claimed that emotion arises from bodily states.In cognitive neuroscience, there is a difference between mental representation (simulation of the outside world by cognition) and neural representation (a physical phenomenon). For this field, it is important to record the human brain in action, to underlie the relationship between structures of the brain to their function.Reductionism is the over-simplification of phenomena, studying them physically (e.g. what structures are activated during emotional states?) to ignore the bigger question (what is the relationship between body and mind?). We tend to reduce our questions from high mental...