Conversations in the Cognitive Neurosciences is a brief, informative yet informal guide to recent developments in the cognitive neurosciences by the scientists who are in the thick of things.
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, se…
"A Bradford book."According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neurosc…
"A Bradford book."In this provocative book, Paul Glimcher argues that economic theory may provide an alternative to the classical Cartesian model of the brain and behavior. Glimcher argues that Cartesian dualism operates from the false premise that the reflex is able to describe behavior in the real world that animals inhabit. A mathematically rich cognitive theory, he claims, could solve the m…
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the latest neuroscientific approaches to the scientific study of creativity. In chapters that progress logically from neurobiological fundamentals to systems of neuroscience and neuro-imaging, leading scholars describe the latest theoretical, genetic, structural, clinical, functional, and applied research on the neural bases of creativity.OCLC-lice…
In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science -- the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just embodied but also intrinsically affective, and she elaborates on …
Although science has made considerable progress in discovering the neural basis of cognition, how consciousness arises remains elusive. In this book, Pennartz analyzes which aspects of conscious experience can be peeled away to access its core: the relationship between brain processes and the qualitative nature of consciousness. Pennartz traces the problem back to its historical foundations and…
Microcircuits, functional modules that act as elementary processing units bridging single cells to systems and behavior, could provide the link between neurons and global brain function. Microcircuits are designed to serve particular functions; examples of these functional modules include the cortical columns in sensory cortici, glomeruli in the olfactory systems of insects and vertebrates, and…
The vast differences between the brain's neural circuitry and a computer's silicon circuitry might suggest that they have nothing in common. In fact, as Dana Ballard argues in this book, computational tools are essential for understanding brain function. Ballard shows that the hierarchical organisation of the brain has many parallels with the hierarchical organisation of computing; as in silico…
"In Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, the authors explore what curiosity is and what it can do. Traipsing across the fields of philosophy and neuroscience, literature and network science, they discover that current definitions of curiosity are remarkably limited. Rather than think of curiosity as a drive to acquire new bits of information, they argue that curiosity is a practice of connec…