Download or read book Making Space written by Jennifer M. Groh and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Space Time and Number in the Brain written by Elizabeth Brannon and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of mathematical cognition and the ways in which the ideas of space, time and number are encoded in brain circuitry has become a fundamental issue for neuroscience. How such encoding differs across cultures and educational level is of further interest in education and neuropsychology. This rapidly expanding field of research is overdue for an interdisciplinary volume such as this, which deals with the neurological and psychological foundations of human numeric capacity. A uniquely integrative work, this volume provides a much needed compilation of primary source material to researchers from basic neuroscience, psychology, developmental science, neuroimaging, neuropsychology and theoretical biology. The first comprehensive and authoritative volume dealing with neurological and psychological foundations of mathematical cognition Uniquely integrative volume at the frontier of a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field Features outstanding and truly international scholarship, with chapters written by leading experts in a variety of fields
Download or read book The Brain in Space written by and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Space Between Our Ears written by Michael Morgan and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this title, Michael Morgan explains how our brain interprets the images that the outside world forms in our eyes. Using sources from over the centuries - philosophical writings, scientific thinking, experiments, passages from poems, novels and films - Morgan reveals the problems that the brain has to confront in manufacturing our perceptions. The book includes optical drawings as well as some simple experiments that the reader can do to test the different components of one's sight and our own reactions to it. There is a long way to go in neurological terms before we can understand how our brains actually see, or indeed the precise location of where this happens inside the grey matter. Morgan recognizes that to achieve such an understanding may even necessitate the development of a new language that can better encompass the difficult scientific and logical interpretations that will have to be made. This work provides an overview of what we know about how the brain works regarding visual space, giving an insight into one of our most vital yet least understood senses.
Download or read book Discovering the Brain written by National Academy of Sciences and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brain ... There is no other part of the human anatomy that is so intriguing. How does it develop and function and why does it sometimes, tragically, degenerate? The answers are complex. In Discovering the Brain, science writer Sandra Ackerman cuts through the complexity to bring this vital topic to the public. The 1990s were declared the "Decade of the Brain" by former President Bush, and the neuroscience community responded with a host of new investigations and conferences. Discovering the Brain is based on the Institute of Medicine conference, Decade of the Brain: Frontiers in Neuroscience and Brain Research. Discovering the Brain is a "field guide" to the brainâ€"an easy-to-read discussion of the brain's physical structure and where functions such as language and music appreciation lie. Ackerman examines: How electrical and chemical signals are conveyed in the brain. The mechanisms by which we see, hear, think, and pay attentionâ€"and how a "gut feeling" actually originates in the brain. Learning and memory retention, including parallels to computer memory and what they might tell us about our own mental capacity. Development of the brain throughout the life span, with a look at the aging brain. Ackerman provides an enlightening chapter on the connection between the brain's physical condition and various mental disorders and notes what progress can realistically be made toward the prevention and treatment of stroke and other ailments. Finally, she explores the potential for major advances during the "Decade of the Brain," with a look at medical imaging techniquesâ€"what various technologies can and cannot tell usâ€"and how the public and private sectors can contribute to continued advances in neuroscience. This highly readable volume will provide the public and policymakersâ€"and many scientists as wellâ€"with a helpful guide to understanding the many discoveries that are sure to be announced throughout the "Decade of the Brain."
Download or read book Human Brain in Standard MNI Space written by Juergen K Mai and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2017-06-24 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human Brain in Standard MNI Space: A Comprehensive Pocket Atlas is a thorough pocket atlas designed for easy reference and interpretation of medical and scientific MR-images. It is intended for both early career and advanced medical students, for residents in radiology and neurology, and those involved in neuroscience research, emphasizing anatomy's relationship to radiology. In addition, the book is ideal for non-specialists interested in issues relating to the brain or the determination of imaging features. - Provides gyral/sulcal designations (in the MNI figures), as well as cortical (Brodmann's areas) delineations (in the diagrams) - Contains a three page section with (small) diagrams, providing 3D reconstruction of the MNI brain with definition of the cortex gyri and sulci - Includes a section that explains the Brodmann areas, along with a list of abbreviations, structures, and a hierarchical tree of structures
Download or read book Brain Changer written by Felice Jacka and published by Macmillan Publishers Aus.. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is a fascinating book, by a leading researcher, covering one of the most exciting areas of modern nutritional research - how what we eat impacts our gut and brain. The combination of personal stories and cutting edge science is a real winner.' Michael Mosley You feel how you eat. We accept that the quality of our diet affects the health of our heart and liver. So why wouldn't diet - good or bad - affect the health of our brain? This is the question that Australian scientist Felice Jacka set out to answer. Having suffered depression and anxiety as a young woman, she wanted to understand the role diet plays in our overall mental and brain health. What she found through her own research and that of other eminent scientists worldwide will revolutionise the way we think about what we eat and how we care for our brains. * Obesity and depression are two major causes of disease and disability across the globe, and each influences the other. *Food does affect mood: highly processed foods increase depression risk, while a balanced, whole-food diet can prevent depression and improve mood. *A healthy diet improves gut health, and in turn health microbiota (gut bacteria) promote brain health and keep our weight in check. *A healthy diet improves brain performance at all ages, from school-age kids to their work-stressed parents. *The Mediterranean diet is linked to lower rates of Alzheimer's disease and general cognitive decline in older people. Professor Jacka, who leads the field of Nutritional Psychiatry research globally, provides not just the most recent scientific evidence but also a range of simple, practical solutions for improving the way we eat on a daily basis, including meal plans and a range of delicious recipes. This is not a diet book. This is a guide to the good habits that will protect your most precious organ, improve your quality of life and optimise mental and brain health across your lifespan. PRAISE FOR BRAIN CHANGER 'Jacka is leading the way in providing evidence-based approaches that are rooted in cutting-edge science to transform how we think about mental health.' Professor John Cryan
Download or read book Space Lizards Stole My Brain written by Mark Griffiths and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Admiral Skink, an alien-lizard warlord from the planet Swerdlix, is attacked by The Hideous and Unimaginably Vast Comet Creature of Poppledock he faces a certain death… but luckily his underlings have installed the BrainTwizzler 360 Mind Migration SystemTM. This nifty invention safely transfers Skink's mind on to a memory wafer and jettisons it through space to find a suitable temporary "home" until he can be rescued by his fellow Swerdlixians. Unluckily for eleven-year-old Lance Spratley it just so happens that the temporary home for Admiral Skink's mind is his body! And while Skink deals with being trapped in Lance's useless body - it can't even breathe fire! - Lance is transferred to a virtual waiting room surrounded by the lizard race who seem intent on destroying Earth when they have successfully retrieved Skink.Will Lance ever get his body back? And even if he does will he be able to thwart Admiral Skink and the Swerdlixians plans to invade Earth…
Download or read book Spatial Cognition written by Joan Stiles-Davis and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2022-10-30 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at the ways humans perceive, interpret, remember, and interact with events occurring in space, this book focuses on two aspects of spatial cognition: How does spatial cognition develop? What is the relation between spatial cognition and the brain? This book offers a unique opportunity to share the combined efforts of scientists from varied disciplines, including cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, behavioral neurology, and neurobiology in the process of interacting and exchanging ideas. Based on a conference held at the Neuroscience Conference Center of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, this book explores current scientific trends seeking a biological basis for understanding the relationships among brain, mind, and behavior.
Download or read book Your Brain Is a Time Machine The Neuroscience and Physics of Time written by Dean Buonomano and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beautifully written, eloquently reasoned…Mr. Buonomano takes us off and running on an edifying scientific journey." —Carol Tavris, Wall Street Journal In Your Brain Is a Time Machine, leading neuroscientist Dean Buonomano embarks on an "immensely engaging" exploration of how time works inside the brain (Barbara Kiser, Nature). The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time, but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological movement and enables "mental time travel"—simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. This virtuosic work of popular science will lead you to a revelation as strange as it is true: your brain is, at its core, a time machine.
Download or read book The Brain from Inside Out written by György Buzsáki MD, PhD and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there a right way to study how the brain works? Following the empiricist's tradition, the most common approach involves the study of neural reactions to stimuli presented by an experimenter. This 'outside-in' method fueled a generation of brain research and now must confront hidden assumptions about causation and concepts that may not hold neatly for systems that act and react. György Buzsáki's The Brain from Inside Out examines why the outside-in framework for understanding brain function has become stagnant and points to new directions for understanding neural function. Building upon the success of 2011's Rhythms of the Brain, Professor Buzsáki presents the brain as a foretelling device that interacts with its environment through action and the examination of action's consequence. Consider that our brains are initially filled with nonsense patterns, all of which are gibberish until grounded by action-based interactions. By matching these nonsense "words" to the outcomes of action, they acquire meaning. Once its circuits are "calibrated" by action and experience, the brain can disengage from its sensors and actuators, and examine "what happens if" scenarios by peeking into its own computation, a process that we refer to as cognition. The Brain from Inside Out explains why our brain is not an information-absorbing coding device, as it is often portrayed, but a venture-seeking explorer constantly controlling the body to test hypotheses. Our brain does not process information: it creates it.
Download or read book The Extended Mind written by Richard Menary and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head.
Download or read book Mind in Motion written by Barbara Tversky and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-05-21 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Zen and the Brain written by James H. Austin and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999-06-04 with total page 876 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Brian the Brain Head Space written by Jenny Mouse and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that your brain controls everything you do? Even though the brain is only 3 pounds it has a big job! Brian the brain is excited to have you tag along with him. See where he lives and what he does all day as he controls his human, Ryan's, every move. Brian the Brain Head Space is a story that teaches young children where their brain is and what it does. They learn that it is important to eat healthy food and get enough rest in order to let their brain do its job! Preschoolers will love following Brian throughout his day, and seeing all of the work he has to do just to help his human, Ryan, cross the road!
Download or read book Time Space Spiking Neural Networks and Brain Inspired Artificial Intelligence written by Nikola K. Kasabov and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-08-29 with total page 742 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spiking neural networks (SNN) are biologically inspired computational models that represent and process information internally as trains of spikes. This monograph book presents the classical theory and applications of SNN, including original author’s contribution to the area. The book introduces for the first time not only deep learning and deep knowledge representation in the human brain and in brain-inspired SNN, but takes that further to develop new types of AI systems, called in the book brain-inspired AI (BI-AI). BI-AI systems are illustrated on: cognitive brain data, including EEG, fMRI and DTI; audio-visual data; brain-computer interfaces; personalized modelling in bio-neuroinformatics; multisensory streaming data modelling in finance, environment and ecology; data compression; neuromorphic hardware implementation. Future directions, such as the integration of multiple modalities, such as quantum-, molecular- and brain information processing, is presented in the last chapter. The book is a research book for postgraduate students, researchers and practitioners across wider areas, including computer and information sciences, engineering, applied mathematics, bio- and neurosciences.
Download or read book The Redemption of Time written by Baoshu and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in the universe of the New York Times bestselling Three-Body Problem trilogy, The Redemption of Time continues Cixin Liu’s multi-award-winning science fiction saga. This original story by Baoshu—published with Liu’s support—envisions the aftermath of the conflict between humanity and the extraterrestrial Trisolarans. In the midst of an interstellar war, Yun Tianming found himself on the front lines. Riddled with cancer, he chose to end his life, only to find himself flash frozen and launched into space where the Trisolaran First Fleet awaited. Captured and tortured beyond endurance for decades, Yun eventually succumbed to helping the aliens subjugate humanity in order to save Earth from complete destruction. Granted a healthy clone body by the Trisolarans, Yun has spent his very long life in exile as a traitor to the human race. Nearing the end of his existence at last, he suddenly receives another reprieve—and another regeneration. A consciousness calling itself The Spirit has recruited him to wage battle against an entity that threatens the existence of the entire universe. But Yun refuses to be a pawn again and makes his own plans to save humanity’s future... At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
