The Conscious Brain

Author : Jesse J. Prinz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2012-08-17
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780199718139

Get Book

The Conscious Brain by Jesse J. Prinz Pdf

The problem of consciousness continues to be a subject of great debate in cognitive science. Synthesizing decades of research, The Conscious Brain advances a new theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz's account of consciousness makes two main claims: first consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and, second, consciousness depends on attention. Attention changes the flow of information allowing perceptual information to access memory systems. Neurobiologically, this change in flow depends on synchronized neural firing. Neural synchrony is also implicated in the unity of consciousness and in the temporal duration of experience. Prinz also explores the limits of consciousness. We have no direct experience of our thoughts, no experience of motor commands, and no experience of a conscious self. All consciousness is perceptual, and it functions to make perceptual information available to systems that allows for flexible behavior. Prinz concludes by discussing prevailing philosophical puzzles. He provides a neuroscientifically grounded response to the leading argument for dualism, and argues that materialists need not choose between functional and neurobiological approaches, but can instead combine these into neurofunctional response to the mind-body problem. The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions, while also surveying, challenging, and extending philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness. All readers interested in the nature of consciousness will find Prinz's work of great interest.

Author : Antonio Damasio
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2010-11-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780307379498

Get Book

Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio Pdf

A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.

Author : Jesse Prinz
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2012-09-27
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780195314595

Get Book

The Conscious Brain by Jesse Prinz Pdf

Synthesizing decades of research, this book advances a theory of the psychological and neurophysiological correlates of conscious experience. Prinz argues that consciousness always arises at a particular stage of perceptual processing, the intermediate level, and that consciousness depends on attention.

Author : Stephen Grossberg
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 771 pages
File Size : 42,6 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780190070557

Get Book

Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain by Stephen Grossberg Pdf

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.

Author : Luis Garcia-Larrea,Philip L. Jackson
Publisher : Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2016-03-03
Category : Medical
ISBN : 9781496348425

Get Book

Pain and the Conscious Brain by Luis Garcia-Larrea,Philip L. Jackson Pdf

Pain and the Conscious Brain brings together more than 30 international leaders from multiple fields to link the complex concept of pain to the equally complex notion of consciousness. Offering a clear, cutting-edge understanding of the brain mechanisms that generate the conscious experience of pain, this book scientifically addresses the difficult and chronic pains that often have no known physical cause and can defy comprehension in terms of current pain theories. Numerous tables, full-color figures, and up-to-date references highlight expert coverage of today’s gradual paradigm shift from peripheral receptors to the intricacy of the brain and the experience of the self.

Author : Stanislas Dehaene
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 352 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2014-01-30
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780698151406

Get Book

Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene Pdf

WINNER OF THE 2014 BRAIN PRIZE From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.

Author : Zoltan Torey
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 206 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2014-08-08
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780262527101

Get Book

The Conscious Mind by Zoltan Torey Pdf

An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind—a new (“off-line”) internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's “awareness” became self-accessible and reflective—that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge—because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired “quality,” “cosmic principle,” “circuitry arrangement,” or “epiphenomenon,” as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.

Author : Steven Peter Russell Rose
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 1976
Category : Brain
ISBN : OCLC:221825092

Get Book

The Conscious Brain by Steven Peter Russell Rose Pdf

Author : Antonio Damasio
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 418 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2012-03-06
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780307474957

Get Book

Self Comes to Mind by Antonio Damasio Pdf

A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.

Author : Steven Peter Russell Rose
Publisher : Paragon House Publishers
Page : 463 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1989
Category : Medical
ISBN : 1557781508

Get Book

The Conscious Brain by Steven Peter Russell Rose Pdf

Author : Steven Rose
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 351 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:1014887129

Get Book

The Conscious Brain by Steven Rose Pdf

Author : James H. Austin
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 876 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 1999-06-04
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0262260352

Get Book

Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin Pdf

A neuroscientist and Zen practitioner interweaves the latest research on the brain with his personal narrative of Zen. Aldous Huxley called humankind's basic trend toward spiritual growth the "perennial philosophy." In the view of James Austin, the trend implies a "perennial psychophysiology"—because awakening, or enlightenment, occurs only when the human brain undergoes substantial changes. What are the peak experiences of enlightenment? How could these states profoundly enhance, and yet simplify, the workings of the brain? Zen and the Brain presents the latest evidence. In this book Zen Buddhism becomes the opening wedge for an extraordinarily wide-ranging exploration of consciousness. In order to understand which brain mechanisms produce Zen states, one needs some understanding of the anatomy, physiology, and chemistry of the brain. Austin, both a neurologist and a Zen practitioner, interweaves the most recent brain research with the personal narrative of his Zen experiences. The science is both inclusive and rigorous; the Zen sections are clear and evocative. Along the way, Austin examines such topics as similar states in other disciplines and religions, sleep and dreams, mental illness, consciousness-altering drugs, and the social consequences of the advanced stage of ongoing enlightenment.

Author : Antonio Damasio
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2021-10-26
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781524747565

Get Book

Feeling & Knowing by Antonio Damasio Pdf

From one of the world’s leading neuroscientists: a succinct, illuminating, wholly engaging investigation of how biology, neuroscience, psychology, and artificial intelligence have given us the tools to unlock the mysteries of human consciousness “One thrilling insight after another ... Damasio has succeeded brilliantly in narrowing the gap between body and mind.” —The New York Times Book Review In recent decades, many philosophers and cognitive scientists have declared the problem of consciousness unsolvable, but Antonio Damasio is convinced that recent findings across multiple scientific disciplines have given us a way to understand consciousness and its significance for human life. In the forty-eight brief chapters of Feeling & Knowing, and in writing that remains faithful to our intuitive sense of what feeling and experiencing are about, Damasio helps us understand why being conscious is not the same as sensing, why nervous systems are essential for the development of feelings, and why feeling opens the way to consciousness writ large. He combines the latest discoveries in various sciences with philosophy and discusses his original research, which has transformed our understanding of the brain and human behavior. Here is an indispensable guide to understand­ing how we experience the world within and around us and find our place in the universe.

Author : Roger Penrose
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : Computers
ISBN : 0195106466

Get Book

Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose Pdf

Presents the author's thesis that consciousness, in its manifestation in the human quality of understanding, is doing something that mere computation cannot; and attempts to understand how such non-computational action might arise within scientifically comprehensive physical laws.

Author : E.J Squires
Publisher : CRC Press
Page : 284 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 1990-01-01
Category : Science
ISBN : 0750300450

Get Book

Conscious Mind in the Physical World by E.J Squires Pdf

We have seen remarkable progress in our detailed understanding of the physical world, from the smallest constituents of atoms to the remotest distances seen by telescopes. However, we have yet to explore the phenomenon of consciousness. Can physical things be conscious or is consciousness something else, forever outside the range of physics? And how does consciousness interact with physical things? A lively account of quantum theory and its puzzles, Conscious Mind in the Physical World examines two developments in particular that have altered the context of discussions about consciousness. One is computer technology, which allows us to make machines that can calculate at speeds far greater than the human brain, while the other is the study of the microscopic world. The book explores philosophical issues such as idealism and free will and speculates on the relationship of consciousness to quantum mechanics. This resource will stimulate physicists with an interest in philosophy, philosophers interested in physics, and anyone fascinated about the waking state of the mind.