Guess what? Our lives are just a series of diseases.
Parenting is the ultimate long-term investment. Be prepared to put far more into it than you get out of it, at least for some time. Given the stresses of contemporary American culture, the happiness of couples plummets the minute they become parents.
Quite simply, cognition refers to thinking. There are the obvious applications of conscious reasoning—doing taxes, playing chess, deconstructing Macbeth—but thought takes many subtler forms, such as interpreting sensory input, guiding physical actions, and empathizing with others.