Understanding the fundamental mechanisms of cognition – how the brain perceives, remembers, decides, and learns – remains one of the central challenges in neuroscience. Recent breakthroughs in large-scale neural recording, targeted circuit perturbation, and biologically informed models are revealing the dynamic and distributed nature of cognitive processes. Researchers are beginning to unify insights across species and scales – from synaptic plasticity to network-level population dynamics – and moving beyond isolated brain regions toward integrated, systems-level frameworks. What are the remaining bottlenecks in uncovering the computational “algorithms” of thought? How can insights across spatial and temporal scales be unified to construct predictive, generalisable models of cognition? This discussion will explore anticipated advances over the next 5, 10, and 25 years—and how these may reshape our understanding, and augmentation, of human cognition.