Philosophical discussions of mechanistic explanation in cognitive science (e.g. Craver 2007; Bechtel 2008) tend to focus on a limited number of canonical examples. Although useful for expository purposes, this focus has yielded a rather impoverished conception of what cognitive mechanisms are like and how they are typically described by scientists. Moreover, it has led some to believe that certain areas of research--e.g. systems neuroscience and dynamical approaches in cognitive science--do not seek mechanistic explanations. In this talk, I will argue that mechanistic explanation does in fact feature prominently in these areas, and that the mechanisms described therein are often far more complex, flexible and distributed than the ones typically discussed by philosophers. Moreover, because researchers in these fields rely on sophisticated mathematical techniques to describe cognitive mechanisms, a better appreciation of such techniques is critical for developing an accurate philosophical understanding of mechanisms and mechanistic explanation in cognitive science.