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Author: Luis H. Favela
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003830358
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Ecological Brain is the first book of its kind, using complexity science to integrate the seemingly disparate fields of ecological psychology and neuroscience. The book develops a unique framework for unifying investigations and explanations of mind that span brain, body, and environment: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). Beginning with an introduction to the history of the fields, the author provides an assessment of why ecological psychology and neuroscience are commonly viewed as irreconcilable methods for investigating and explaining cognition, intelligent behavior, and the systems that realize them. The book then progresses to its central aim: presenting a unified investigative and explanatory framework offering concepts, methods, and theories applicable across neural and ecological scales of investigation. By combining the core principles of ecological psychology, neural population dynamics, and synergetics under a unified complexity science approach, NExT offers a compressive investigative framework to explain and understand neural, bodily, and environmental contributions to perception-action and other forms of intelligent behavior and thought. The book progresses the conversation around the role of brains in ecological psychology, as well as bodies and environments in neuroscience. It is essential reading for all students of ecological psychology, perception, cognitive sciences, and neuroscience, as well as anyone interested in the history and philosophy of the brain/mind sciences and their state-of-the-art methods and theories.
Author: Luis H. Favela
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003830358
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The Ecological Brain is the first book of its kind, using complexity science to integrate the seemingly disparate fields of ecological psychology and neuroscience. The book develops a unique framework for unifying investigations and explanations of mind that span brain, body, and environment: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). Beginning with an introduction to the history of the fields, the author provides an assessment of why ecological psychology and neuroscience are commonly viewed as irreconcilable methods for investigating and explaining cognition, intelligent behavior, and the systems that realize them. The book then progresses to its central aim: presenting a unified investigative and explanatory framework offering concepts, methods, and theories applicable across neural and ecological scales of investigation. By combining the core principles of ecological psychology, neural population dynamics, and synergetics under a unified complexity science approach, NExT offers a compressive investigative framework to explain and understand neural, bodily, and environmental contributions to perception-action and other forms of intelligent behavior and thought. The book progresses the conversation around the role of brains in ecological psychology, as well as bodies and environments in neuroscience. It is essential reading for all students of ecological psychology, perception, cognitive sciences, and neuroscience, as well as anyone interested in the history and philosophy of the brain/mind sciences and their state-of-the-art methods and theories.
Author: Thomas Fuchs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199646880
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Part 1: Criticism of neurobiological reductionism 1 Cosmos in the head? 1.1 The idealistic legacy of brain research 1.2 First criticism: embodied perception 1.2.1 Perception and motion 1.2.2 The coextension of lived body and physical body 1.3 Second criticism: The objectivity of the phenomenal world 1.3.1 The space of perception 1.3.2 The objectivising achievement of perception 1.4 Third criticism: the reality of colours 1.5 Summary 2 The brain as the subjects heir? 2.1 First critique: the irreducibility of subjectivity 2.1.1 Phenomenal consciousness 2.1.2 Intentionality 2.1.2.1 Intentionality and phenomenal consciousness 2.1.2.2 Intentionality and representation 2.2 Second criticism: category mistakes 2.2.1 The mereological fallacy 2.2.2 The localisation fallacy 2.3 Third criticism: the powerless subject? 2.3.1 The unity of action 2.3.2 The role of consciousness 2.4 Summary: the primacy of the lifeworld Part 2: Body, person, and the brain 3 Foundations: subjectivity and life 3.1 Embodied subjectivity 3.1.1 The body as subject 3.1.2 The dual aspect of subjective and physical body 3.1.3 The dual aspect of life 3.2 Ecological and enactive biology 3.2.1 Self-organisation and autonomy 3.2.2 Dependency and exchange between organism and environment 3.2.3 Subjectivity 3.2.4 Summary 3.3 The circular and integral causality of living beings 3.3.1 Vertical circular causality 3.3.2 Horizontal circular causality 3.3.3 Integral causality and its basis in capacities 3.3.4 The formation of capacities through body memory 3.3.5 Summary 4 The brain as organ of the living being 4.1 The brain in the context of the organism 4.1.1 The inner milieu 4.1.2 The feeling of being alive 4.1.3 Higher levels of consciousness 4.1.4 Embodied affectivity 4.1.4 Summary 4.2 The unity of brain, organism and environment 4.2.1 Linear versus circular organism-environment-relations 4.2.2 Consciousness as integral 4.2.3 Neuroplasticity and the incorporation of experience 4.2.4 Transformation and transparency: the brain as resonance organ 4.2.5 Information, representation and resonance 4.2.5.1 Information 4.2.5.2 Representation 4.2.5.3 Patterns and resonance 4.2.6 Conclusion: mediated immediacy 5 The brain as organ of the person 5.1 Primary intersubjectivity 5.1.1 Prenatal development 5.1.2 Intercorporeality and interaffectivity 5.1.3 Intercorporeal memory 5.2 Neurobiological foundations 5.2.1 The attachment system 5.2.2 The social resonance system (mirror neurons) 5.2.2.1 Foundations 5.2.2.2 Simulation or resonance? 5.3 Secondary intersubjectivity 5.3.1 The nine-month revolution 5.3.2 The embodied development of language 5.3.2.1 Language as social practice 5.3.2.2 Neurobiological foundations 5.3.3 Outlook: language, thought and perspective-taking 5.4 Summary: brain and culture 6 The concept of dual aspectivity 6.1 Mental, physical and life attributes 6.2 Differentiation from identity theories 6.3 Emergence 219 6.3.1 The primacy of function 219 6.3.2 Downward causality and dual aspectivity 6.4 Consequences for psychophysical relations 6.4.1 Intentional and psychological determination of physiological processes 6.4.2 Embodied freedom 6.4.2.1 A phenomenology of decision-making 6.4.2.2 Free will and integral causality 6.4.3 Psychosomatic and somatopsychic interrelations 6.5 Summary 7 Implications for psychiatry and psychological medicine 7.1 Neurobiological reductionism in psychiatry 7.2 Mental disorders as circular processes 7.2.1 Vertical circularity 7.2.2 Horizontal circularity 7.2.3 Synopsis 7.3 Circular causality in pathogenesis 7.3.1 Etiology of depression 7.3.2 The development of vulnerability 7.3.3 Summary 7.4 Circular processes in therapy 7.4.1 Somatic therapy 7.4.2 Psychotherapy 7.4.3 Comparison of therapeutic approaches 7.5 Summary: the role of subjectivity 8 Conclusion 8.1 Brain and person 8.2 The scope of neurobiological research 8.3 Naturalistic versus personalistic concept of the human being.
Author: Susan D. Healy
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199546754
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 171
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Book Description
What role has natural selection played in shaping the structure and function of the vertebrate brain? This accessible book unravels the myriad adaptive explanations that have built up over decades, providing both a review and a critique of the work that has sought to explain which natural selection pressures have led to changes in brain size.
Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262038048
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
A book about ecology without information dumping, guilt inducing, or preaching to the choir. Don't care about ecology? You think you don't, but you might all the same. Don't read ecology books? This book is for you. Ecology books can be confusing information dumps that are out of date by the time they hit you. Slapping you upside the head to make you feel bad. Grabbing you by the lapels while yelling disturbing facts. Handwringing in agony about “What are we going to do?” This book has none of that. Being Ecological doesn't preach to the eco-choir. It's for you—even, Timothy Morton explains, if you're not in the choir, even if you have no idea what choirs are. You might already be ecological. After establishing the approach of the book (no facts allowed!), Morton draws on Kant and Heidegger to help us understand living in an age of mass extinction caused by global warming. He considers the object of ecological awareness and ecological thinking: the biosphere and its interconnections. He discusses what sorts of actions count as ecological—starting a revolution? going to the garden center to smell the plants? And finally, in “Not a Grand Tour of Ecological Thought,” he explores a variety of current styles of being ecological—a range of overlapping orientations rather than preformatted self-labeling. Caught up in the us-versus-them (or you-versus-everything else) urgency of ecological crisis, Morton suggests, it's easy to forget that you are a symbiotic being entangled with other symbiotic beings. Isn't that being ecological?
Author: Timothy Morton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674064224
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 179
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Book Description
In this passionate, lucid, and surprising book, Timothy Morton argues that all forms of life are connected in a vast, entangling mesh. This interconnectedness penetrates all dimensions of life. No being, construct, or object can exist independently from the ecological entanglement, Morton contends, nor does ÒNatureÓ exist as an entity separate from the uglier or more synthetic elements of life.
Author: Cynthia Moss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429978332
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 462
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Book Description
How do bats catch insects in the dark? How do bees learn which flowers to visit? How do food-storing birds remember where their hoards are? Questions like these are addressed by neuroethology, the branch of behavioral neuroscience concerned with analyzing the neural bases of naturally occurring behaviors. This book brings together thirteen chapters presenting findings on perceptual and cognitive processes in some of the most active areas of neuroethological research, including auditory localization by bats and owls, song perception and learning in birds, pitch processing by frogs and toads, imprinting in birds, spatial memory in birds, learning in bees and in Aplysia, and electroreception in fish. A variety of approaches are represented, such as field studies, psychophysical tests, electrophysiological experiments, lesion studies, comparative neuroanatomy, and studies of development. Each chapter gives an up-to-date overview of a particular author’s research and places it within the broader context of issues about animal perception and cognition. The book as a whole exemplifies how studying species and their particular specializations can inform general issues in psychology, ethology, and neuro-science.
Author: James J. Gibson
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 113505973X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 349
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Book Description
This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do. The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision -- and what this book is about.
Author: Georg Northoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262552825
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 533
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Book Description
An argument for a Copernican revolution in our consideration of mental features—a shift in which the world-brain problem supersedes the mind-body problem. Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features. Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, explains that empirical evidence suggests that the brain's spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central to aligning and integrating the brain within the world. This spatiotemporal structure allows the brain to extend beyond itself into body and world, creating the “world-brain relation” that is central to mental features. Northoff makes his argument in empirical, ontological, and epistemic-methodological terms. He discusses current models of the brain and applies these models to recent data on neuronal features underlying consciousness and proposes the world-brain relation as the ontological predisposition for consciousness.
Author: Jan-Olav Henriksen
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031210581
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
The Anthropocene presents theology, and especially theological anthropology, with unprecedented challenges. There are no immediately available resources in the theological tradition that reflect directly on such experiences. Accordingly, the situation calls for contextually based theological reflection of what it means to be human under such circumstances. This book discusses the main elements in theological anthropology in light of the fundamental points: a) that theological anthropology needs to be articulated with reference to, and informed by, the concrete historical circumstances in which humanity presently finds itself, and b) that the notion of the Anthropocene can be used as a heuristic tool to describe important traits and conditions that call for a response by humanity, and which entail the need for a renewal of what a Christian self-understanding means. Jan-Olav Henriksen explores what such a response entails from the point of view of contemporary theological anthropology and discusses selected topics that can contribute to a contextually based position.
Author: Francisco Aboitiz
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137540605
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 515
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Book Description
This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.
