In the name of science, their theory on bungee jumping had to be tested.

Guillaume Garih, a fourth-year cognitive science student at Carleton, strapped heart sensors on a fellow classmate to answer one question about the extreme sport as part of an activity for the Cognitive Science Student Society: “what was the most strenuous moment for the body compared to what was the scariest?”

The data had two peaks, he says, which matched what his classmate described; it’s scariest right before you jump, but after you’re exhilarated from the experience.

Carleton’s Institute of Cognitive Science was only founded in 2002, but students and faculty agree the risk to create one of Canada’s only cognitive science programs was well worth it.

“I’ve never heard anyone disappointed about the cognitive science program. There’s a passion,” says Garih. “We all have something we love about it.”

Cognitive science is the study of intelligence and how the human mind learns. It’s an interdisciplinary program, which draws on different fields to solve questions about the mind and intelligence.

“It’s a combination of philosophy, psychology, computer science and linguistics all interested in the same question of how people, other organisms and even computers think,” says Jo-Anne LeFevre, director of the Institute of Cognitive Science.

Carleton’s program is one of the few undergraduate and the only graduate programs in the country, says LeFevre, with about 85 undergraduate students and 30 graduate students enrolled last year.

“It’s not an easy program because it pulls from so many different disciplines that are superficially often quite different,” LeFevre says. “So students in the program have to be capable of thinking in lots of different ways.”

Through its many disciplines, cognitive science looks at anything from artificial intelligence to language processing.

LeFevre, a psychology professor, works on numerical and lexical cognition, studying how people do math, why some people are better at math and the mental mathematical process.

“In a typical cognitive science approach you would probably have multiple people involved who are addressing the same question from different perspectives,” LeFevre says.

However, it’s this diversity that entices students, says Hana Rae Lang, a third-year student in cognitive science.

“I didn’t want to narrow down what I was learning about. I wanted a wider perspective on cognition,” she says. “Everyone in the department is so incredibly passionate about cognitive science, and it’s such a new department everyone is so willing to do whatever it takes to get it off the ground.”

Getting the program off the ground, however, wasn’t easy, says Andrew Brook, a Carleton philosophy professor and the founder and first director of the institute.

“When we started in the early ’90s, [the field of] cognitive science was only about 10 years old,” Brook says. “Carleton was unique in one very important respect, and that is that we had people who were interested in this from all four of the main disciplines.”

Carleton’s program sprouted out of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies founded in 1992. Brook says he agreed to take the position as director of interdisciplinary studies only if he could develop a cognitive science program, which he eventually headed.

“Getting your voice heard is a challenge, it takes some time, but as soon as we started to produce top-notch students, the university started to take notice and provide resources,” says Brook.

LeFevre and Brook see two goals to continue the expansion of the institute.

 “A program is always going to be more vibrant if it’s got enough people to carry it through,” says LeFevre, noting she wants to increase the student body by around 50 per cent.

The other issue is bringing the faculty together in one building, says Brook, since it’s sometimes hard for people in interdisciplinary fields to share ideas and work with their colleagues.

Regardless, for Garih the cognitive science program has been like his bungee jump experiment, “50 per cent fun and 50 per cent science,” he says.

He has done co-op through the program, working as a psychologist’s assistant in Peru through the World University Service of Canada and at IBM as an evaluation and retention co-ordinator.

“It’s a challenging program,” he says. “But it’s just as much about learning as it is about opening your mind.”