Space, Objects, Minds and Brains

Space, Objects, Minds and Brains PDF Author: Lynn C. Robertson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135433259
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Lynn Robertson has been studying how brain lesions affect spatial abilities for over 20 years, and her work has revealed some surprising facts about space and its role in visual perception. In this book she combines evidence collected in her laboratory with findings from others to explore the cognitive and neural basis of spatial representations and their contributions to spatial awareness, object formation, attention, and binding.

Space, Objects, Minds and Brains

Space, Objects, Minds and Brains PDF Author: Lynn C. Robertson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1135433259
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
Lynn Robertson has been studying how brain lesions affect spatial abilities for over 20 years, and her work has revealed some surprising facts about space and its role in visual perception. In this book she combines evidence collected in her laboratory with findings from others to explore the cognitive and neural basis of spatial representations and their contributions to spatial awareness, object formation, attention, and binding.

Making Space

Making Space PDF Author: Jennifer M. Groh
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 067474487X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Knowing where things are seems effortless. Yet our brains devote tremendous computational power to figuring out the simplest details about spatial relationships. Going to the grocery store or finding our cell phone requires sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. Making Space traces this mental detective work to explain how the brain creates our sense of location. But it goes further, to make the case that spatial processing permeates all our cognitive abilities, and that the brain’s systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought itself. Our senses measure energy in the form of light, sound, and pressure on the skin, and our brains evaluate these measurements to make inferences about objects and boundaries. Jennifer Groh describes how eyes detect electromagnetic radiation, how the brain can locate sounds by measuring differences of less than one one-thousandth of a second in how long they take to reach each ear, and how the ear’s balance organs help us monitor body posture and movement. The brain synthesizes all this neural information so that we can navigate three-dimensional space. But the brain’s work doesn’t end there. Spatial representations do double duty in aiding memory and reasoning. This is why it is harder to remember how to get somewhere if someone else is driving, and why, if we set out to do something and forget what it was, returning to the place we started can jog our memory. In making space the brain uses powers we did not know we have.

A Thousand Brains

A Thousand Brains PDF Author: Jeff Hawkins
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541675800
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
A bestselling author, neuroscientist, and computer engineer unveils a theory of intelligence that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI. For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence? Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world—not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discovery allows Hawkins to answer important questions about how we perceive the world, why we have a sense of self, and the origin of high-level thought. A Thousand Brains heralds a revolution in the understanding of intelligence. It is a big-think book, in every sense of the word. One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2021 One of Bill Gates' Five Favorite Books of 2021

Mind and Cosmos

Mind and Cosmos PDF Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199919755
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

Mind in Motion

Mind in Motion PDF Author: Barbara Tversky
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093078
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

Brain and Mind

Brain and Mind PDF Author: J. R. Smythies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317579550
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Presenting some modern views on the problem of the nature of mind and its relationship to the brain, this book, published in 1965, brings together contributors from various disciplines which are affected by this issue. Coming from different philosophical outlooks as well as subjects, these contributors also comment on each other’s’ chapters with a view of developing thought on the approaches to the problem. The theory of mind-brain relationship is vital to human interest and has been in debate throughout western thought over centuries, split mainly into dualist and monistic theories. These discussions had and still have wide impact philosophy, psychology, religion and cosmology, among other areas.

Understanding Consciousness

Understanding Consciousness PDF Author: Max Velmans
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134095236
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 723

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Book Description
Understanding Consciousness, 2nd Edition provides a unique survey and evaluation of consciousness studies, along with an original analysis of consciousness that combines scientific findings, philosophy and common sense. Building on the widely praised first edition, this new edition adds fresh research, and deepens the original analysis in a way that reflects some of the fundamental changes in the understanding of consciousness that have taken place over the last 10 years. The book is divided into three parts; Part one surveys current theories of consciousness, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Part two reconstructs an understanding of consciousness from first principles, starting with its phenomenology, and leading to a closer examination of how conscious experience relates to the world described by physics and information processing in the brain. Finally, Part three deals with some of the fundamental issues such as what consciousness is and does, and how it fits into to the evolving universe. As the structure of the book moves from a basic overview of the field to a successively deeper analysis, it can be used both for those new to the subject and for more established researchers. Understanding Consciousness tells a story with a beginning, middle and end in a way that integrates the philosophy of consciousness with the science. Overall, the book provides a unique perspective on how to address the problems of consciousness and as such, will be of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and other professionals concerned with mind/body relationships, and all who are interested in this subject.

Expansion of Physics through Nanoscience

Expansion of Physics through Nanoscience PDF Author: Wolfram Schommers
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110525593
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
In contrast to other publications this work discusses Nanoscience strictly at the ultimate level where the properties of atomic matter emerge. The renowned author presents an interdisciplinary approach leading to the forefront of research of quantum-theoretical aspects of time, selforganizing nanoprocesses, brain functions, the matter-mind problem, behaviour research and philosophical questions.

Mind, Brain, and Language

Mind, Brain, and Language PDF Author: Marie T. Banich
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 113566739X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 491

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Book Description
Much of the groundbreaking work in many fields is now occurring at the intersection of traditional academic disciplines. This development is well demonstrated in this important and unique volume, which offers a multidisciplinary view of current findings and cutting-edge issues involving the relationship between mind, brain, and language. Marie T. Banich and Molly Mack have edited a collection of 11 invited chapters from top researchers (and have contributed two of their own chapters) to create a volume organized around five major topics--language emergence, influence, and development; models of language and language processing; the neurological bases of language; language disruption and loss; and dual-language systems. Topics range from the evolution of language and child-language acquisition to brain imaging and the "bilingual brain." To maintain continuity throughout, care has been taken to ensure that the chapters have been written in a style accessible to scholars across many disciplines, from anthropology and psycholinguistics to cognitive science and neurobiology. Because of its depth and breadth, this book is appropriate both as a textbook in a variety of undergraduate and graduate-level courses and as a valuable resource for researchers and scholars interested in further understanding the background of and current developments in our understanding of the mind/brain/language relationship.

Neuroscience, Robotics and Virtual Reality: Internalised vs Externalised Mind/Brain

Neuroscience, Robotics and Virtual Reality: Internalised vs Externalised Mind/Brain PDF Author: Irini Giannopulu
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319955586
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This is the first volume in the Cognitive Computation Trends book series, summarising our understanding on the neural correlate of memory, perception-representation, action, language, emotion and consciousness and their mutual interactions. Integrating research in the field of the Neuroscience, Robotics and Virtual Reality, this book is an original and attainable resource that has not been developed in any other writing. In 5 chapters, the author considers that representations are based on allegorical traces and are consciously and/or unconsciously embrained, and that the creation of robots is the expression of the mind. Whole-body virtual motion is thought of as the archetypal expression of virtual reality. Therefore, visual reality is analysed in a context of visuo-vestibular and somesthetic conflict while mixed and augmented reality are scrutinised in a context of visuo-vestibular and somesthetic interaction. This monograph is an indispensable handbook for students and investigators engaged in history of science, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, engineering and those interested in there interconnections. The ambition of the book is to give students and investigators ideas on which they can build their future research in this new blooming area.