Three blind men were exploring an elephant. The first of them, who happened to reach the leg, described the elephant as something like a tree trunk—high and of cylindrical shape. The second one grasped the ear and described the elephant as something like a blanket—flexible, thin, and covering a large surface. The third grasped the trunk and formed an image of a long and flexible pipe-shaped object like a hose. For a long time they argued about the right conception of the elephant. We cognitive scientists are often in the role of those blind researchers trying to understand human cognition. Because it is a huge and complex object of study, each of us approaches it from a certain perspective and studies only a tiny bit of it. Although we do not misrepresent the whole of cognition with the particular object of study, say memory or analogy, we tend to think of mechanisms that could explain the tiny fraction we have focused on. To continue the elephant story, when “trunk specialists” observe the fluid that comes out when the trunk is cut, they tend to hypothesize that it is an olfactory secretion.“Leg specialists” also observe a fluid coming out when the leg is cut but have a very different hypothesis about it—it must be some filling of the leg. The fact that this fluid is one and the same in all cases (blood) and has the same function can be discovered only when these scientists come together and consider the elephant as a whole. They need to explore the interactions between various parts (eg, that an infection in the leg might cause complications