Conversations With Neil's Brain

Conversations With Neil's Brain PDF Author: William H Calvin
Publisher: Addison Wesley Publishing Company
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A different slip could wipe out Neil's ability to speak Spanish (his second language) but not his native English. Another could leave him able to identify an animal as an elephant, but never able to remember that its name was Babar.

Conversations with Neil's Brain

Conversations with Neil's Brain PDF Author: William H. Calvin
Publisher: William H. Calvin
ISBN: 0982916760
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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Book Description


How Brains Think

How Brains Think PDF Author: William H. Calvin
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465066895
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
If you're good at finding the one right answer to life's multiple-choice questions, you're "smart." But "intelligence" is what you need when contemplating the leftovers in the refrigerator, trying to figure out what might go with them; or if you're trying to speak a sentence that you've never spoken before. As Jean Piaget said, intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do, when all the standard answers are inadequate. This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives. Ever since Darwin, we've known that elegant things can emerge (indeed, self-organize) from "simpler" beginnings. And, says theoretical neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, the bootstrapping of new ideas works much like the immune response or the evolution of a new animal species -- except that the brain can turn the Darwinian crank a lot faster, on the time scale of thought and action. Drawing on anthropology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the neurosciences, Calvin also considers how a more intelligent brain developed using slow biological improvements over the last few million years. Long ago, evolving jack-of-all trades versatility was encouraged by abrupt climate changes. Now, evolving intelligence uses a nonbiological track: augmenting human intelligence and building intelligent machines.

The Visual Language of Comics

The Visual Language of Comics PDF Author: Neil Cohn
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441174516
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Drawings and sequential images are an integral part of human expression dating back at least as far as cave paintings, and in contemporary society appear most prominently in comics. Despite this fundamental part of human identity, little work has explored the comprehension and cognitive underpinnings of visual narratives-until now. This work presents a provocative theory: that drawings and sequential images are structured the same as language. Building on contemporary theories from linguistics and cognitive psychology, it argues that comics are written in a visual language of sequential images that combines with text. Like spoken and signed languages, visual narratives use a lexicon of systematic patterns stored in memory, strategies for combining these patterns into meaningful units, and a hierarchic grammar governing the combination of sequential images into coherent expressions. Filled with examples and illustrations, this book details each of these levels of structure, explains how cross-cultural differences arise in diverse visual languages of the world, and describes what the newest neuroscience research reveals about the brain's comprehension of visual narratives. From this emerges the foundation for a new line of research within the linguistic and cognitive sciences, raising intriguing questions about the connections between language and the diversity of humans' expressive behaviours in the mind and brain.

How Brains Think

How Brains Think PDF Author: William H. Calvin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780297816393
Category : Brain
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description


When the Brain Can't Hear

When the Brain Can't Hear PDF Author: Teri James Bellis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743428644
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
In the first book on the subject for lay readers, an esteemed Auditory Processing Disorder expert--and sufferer--gives people the tools they need to spot and fight it.

Into the Magic Shop

Into the Magic Shop PDF Author: James R. Doty, MD
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698404025
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The award-winning New York Times bestseller about the extraordinary things that can happen when we harness the power of both the brain and the heart Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart. Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.

Conversations with God for Teens

Conversations with God for Teens PDF Author: Neale Donald Walsch
Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing
ISBN: 1612831168
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Suppose you could ask God any question and get an answer. What would it be? Young people all over the world have been asking those questions. So Neale Donald Walsch, author of the internationally bestselling Conversations with God series had another conversation. Conversations with God for Teens is a simple, clear, straight-to-the-point dialogue that answers teens questions about God, money, sex, love, and more. Conversations with God for Teens reads like a rap session at a church youth group, where teenagers discuss everything they ever wanted to know about life but were too afraid to ask God. Walsch acts as the verbal conduit, showing teenagers how easy it is to converse with the divine. When Claudia, age 16, from Perth, Australia, asks, "Why can't I just have sex with everybody? What's the big deal?", the answer God offers her is: "Nothing you do will ever be okay with everybody. 'Everybody' is a large word. The real question is can you have sex and have it be okay with you?" There's no doubt that the casual question-and-answer format will help make God feel welcoming and accessible to teens. Conversations with God for Teens is the perfect gift purchase for parents, grandparents, and anyone else who wants to provide accessible spiritual content for the teen(s) in their lives.

The Believing Brain

The Believing Brain PDF Author: Michael Shermer
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429972610
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
The Believing Brain is bestselling author Michael Shermer's comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world's best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come first and explanations for beliefs follow. The brain, Shermer argues, is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses, the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. Our brains connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen, and these patterns become beliefs. Once beliefs are formed the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive-feedback loop of belief confirmation. Shermer outlines the numerous cognitive tools our brains engage to reinforce our beliefs as truths. Interlaced with his theory of belief, Shermer provides countless real-world examples of how this process operates, from politics, economics, and religion to conspiracy theories, the supernatural, and the paranormal. Ultimately, he demonstrates why science is the best tool ever devised to determine whether or not a belief matches reality.

Brainhack

Brainhack PDF Author: Neil Pavitt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 085708643X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Hack into the secret power of your brain Your Brain 100 Billion Neurons 100 Trillion Connections And you only command 5% of it. Now it's time to take back control! In Brainhack, creativity coach Neil Pavitt gives you tips and tricks to re-programme your brain, developing the skills and insights that can transform how you think, solve problems and make decisions. This book will help you: • Learn to think smarter • Become more focused • Discover creative approaches to problem-solving • Generate ideas with innovative techniques • Unlock your brain blocks