Download or read book Brain Symbol Experience written by Charles D. Laughlin and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1990 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint, in paper covers, of the Columbia U. Press edition of 1990. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book The Symbolic Species The Co evolution of Language and the Brain written by Terrence W. Deacon and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998-04-17 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.

Download or read book The Mystical Mind written by Andrew B. Newberg, Eugene G. D'Aquili and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the mind experience the sacred? What biological mechanisms are involved in mystical states and trances? Is there a neurological basis for patterns in comparative religions? Does religion have an evolutionary function? This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this scheme to mythmaking, ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experiences, and theology itself. Anchored in such research, the authors also sketch the implications of their work for philosophy, science, theology, and the future of religion.

Download or read book Symbols and Embodiment written by Manuel de Vega and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive scientists have a variety of approaches to studying cognition: experimental psychology, computer science, robotics, neuroscience, educational psychology, philosophy of mind, and psycholinguistics, to name but a few. In addition, they also differ in their approaches to cognition - some of them consider that the mind works basically like a computer, involving programs composed of abstract, amodal, and arbitrary symbols. Others claim that cognition is embodied - that is, symbols must be grounded on perceptual, motoric, and emotional experience. The existence of such different approaches has consequences when dealing with practical issues such as understanding brain disorders, designing artificial intelligence programs and robots, improving psychotherapy, or designing instructional programs. The symbolist and embodiment camps seldom engage in any kind of debate to clarify their differences. This book is the first attempt to do so. It brings together a team of outstanding scientists, adopting symbolist and embodied viewpoints, in an attempt to understand how the mind works and the nature of linguistic meaning. As well as being interdisciplinary, all authors have made an attempt to find solutions to substantial issues beyond specific vocabularies and techniques.

Download or read book Brain Mystery Light and Dark written by Charles Don Keyes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-06-07 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brain Mystery Light and Dark examines scientific models of how the brain becomes conscious and argues that the spiritual dimension of life is compatible with the main scientific theories. Keyes shows us that the belief in the unity of mind and brain does not necessarily undermine aesthetic, religious, and ethical beliefs.

Download or read book Visual Literacy written by James Elkins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-09-11 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to be visually literate? Does it mean different things in the arts and the sciences? In the developed West or in developing nations? This groundbreaking collection explores what impact the new concept of "visual literacy" has on art history.

Download or read book Life of Brain written by Ray Fuller and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is about everything that goes on in your conscious experience: sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts, imagination, plans, expectations. It’s also about your conscious experience of self, the sense that there is a YOU behind everything, a YOU that is having all these experiences, a YOU that seems to control all those activities of the mind. Some of the questions it explores: - What is conscious experience? - How did it evolve? - Why did it evolve? - How does it develop in the young child? - What can we do with it? - Why might it cause us problems? - Why is it still a mystery? This book is NOT about the neurological landscape and its functions studied by the neuroscientist armed with the latest fMRI technology (which incidentally measures brain activity indirectly through the flow of blood in response to different tasks). You don’t have to know brain anatomy, you don’t have to tell your hippocampus from your hypothalamus. This book will be of interest to YOU if you have ever wondered about the nature of conscious experience and the workings of your own consciousness. It may well tell you more about YOU than any other book you have ever read. Students of psychology, philosophy and evolution will find it of particular relevance to their areas of inquiry.

Download or read book Letters to Vanessa written by Jeremy Hayward and published by Shambhala Publications. This book was released on 1997-09-02 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world we inhabit is enchanted—every tree, rock, and star, and even "empty" space itself, is teeming with living energy and awareness. And it's all nearer to us than our own breath. Why, then, can't we see it? Because, according to Jeremy Hayward, we are taught not to. And because our cultural conditioning keeps us in denial about the fact that a strictly scientific worldview provides only a partial, and unsatisfactory, view of reality. Letters to Vanessa is the guidebook for a generation caught in the crunch between the hard realities of science and the genuine yearning for an experience of the sacred. In a series of letters addressed to his teenage daughter, Dr. Hayward points the way past the limits of science and shows how we can connect with the magical, multidimensional universe of soul. Along the way he presents the most recent findings of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, new biology, and physics in a most engaging and understandable way. He also provides practical meditation instructions that will enable everyone to reconnect with the joyous reality of ordinary life.

Download or read book 30 Second Brain written by Anil Seth and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2014-03-06 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we all at the mercy of our brain chemistry? Do you think that the amygdala and the hippocampus are fantastical sea monsters? What can an MRI scan tell us? Could you explain to dinner-party guests why we don’t giggle when we tickle ourselves? 30-Second Brain is here to fill your mind with the science of exactly what’s happening inside your head. Using no more than two pages, 300 words and an illustration, this is the quickest way to understand the wiring and function of the most complex and intricate mechanism in the human body. Discover how the networks of 90 billion nerve cells work together to produce perception, action, cognition and emotion. Explore how your brain defines your personality, and what it gets up to while you are asleep. Illustrated with mind-bending graphics and supported by biographies of pioneers in the field of neuroscience, it’s the book to get your grey matter thinking about your grey matter.

Download or read book Brain Matters written by Patricia Wolfe and published by ASCD. This book was released on 2010 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned educator and consultant Patricia Wolfe introduces you to the anatomy of the brain and explains teaching strategies that match how the brain learns best through projects, simulations, visuals, music, writing, and mnemonics.

Download or read book Psychosis and Near Psychosis written by Eric R. Marcus and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychosis and Near Psychosis offers a psychoanalytically-based approach to an integrated treatment of psychosis and near psychosis, achieved by organizing psychotherapy, medication, hospital and milieu interventions into a powerful therapeutic tool. The author navigates confidently between psychiatric and psychoanalytic approaches, between biological evidence and psychological assessments. According to Dr. Eric Marcus, since the past, so-called heroic psychoanalyses with psychotic patients have clearly been shown to fail, the time is now ripe again to discuss psychosis in terms of the broadened psychoanalytic theory, with the support of medication and a better understanding of the neuropsychological factors involved. This book, which maps out mental illness in concrete and innovative ways, will interest all researchers and clinicians eager to find the best means, both practical and theoretical, to initiate satisfying psychiatric therapies.

Download or read book Birth as an American Rite of Passage written by Robbie E. Davis-Floyd and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do so many American women allow themselves to become enmeshed in the standardized routines of technocratic childbirth--routines that can be insensitive, unnecessary, and even unhealthy? Anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd first addressed these questions in the 1992 edition. Her new preface to this 2003 edition of a book that has been read, applauded, and loved by women all over the world, makes it clear that the issues surrounding childbirth remain as controversial as ever.

Download or read book Middle Way Philosophy written by Robert M. Ellis and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2015-07-06 with total page 710 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A departure at right angles to thinking in the modern Western world. An important, original work, that should get the widest possible hearing" (Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and his Emissary) Middle Way Philosophy is not about compromise, but about the avoidance of dogma and the integration of conflicting assumptions. To rely on experience as our guide, we need to avoid the interpretation of experience through unnecessary dogmas. Drawing on a range of influences in Buddhist practice, Western philosophy and psychology, Middle Way Philosophy questions alike the assumptions of scientific naturalism, religious revelation and political absolutism, trying to separate what addresses experience in these doctrines from what is merely assumed. This Omnibus edition of Middle Way Philosophy includes all four of the volumes previously published separately: 1. The Path of Objectivity, 2. The Integration of Desire, 3. The Integration of Meaning, and 4. The Integration of Belief.

Download or read book Memory and the Computational Brain written by C. R. Gallistel and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memory and the Computational Brain offers a provocative argument that goes to the heart of neuroscience, proposing that the field can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory over the course of the last several decades. A provocative argument that impacts across the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience, suggesting new perspectives on learning mechanisms in the brain Proposes that the field of neuroscience can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory Suggests that the architecture of the brain is structured precisely for learning and for memory, and integrates the concept of an addressable read/write memory mechanism into the foundations of neuroscience Based on lectures in the prestigious Blackwell-Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition, and now significantly reworked and expanded to make it ideal for students and faculty

Download or read book Climate Change and the Symbol Deficit in the Christian Tradition written by Jan-Olav Henriksen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-24 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring how the climate crisis discloses the symbol deficit in the Christian tradition, this book argues that Christianity is rich in symbols that identify and address the failures of humans and the obstacles that prevent humans from doing well, while positive symbols that can engage people in constructive action seem underdeveloped. Henriksen examines the potential of the Christian tradition to develop symbols that can engage peoples in committed and sustained action to prevent further crisis. To do so, he argues that we need symbols that engage both intellectually and emotionally, and which enhance our perception of belonging in relationships with other humans, be it both in the present and in the future. According to Henriksen, the deficit can only be obliterated if we can develop symbols that have some root or resonance in the Christian tradition, provide concrete and specified guidance of agency, engage people both emotionally and intellectually, and finally open up to visions for a moral agency that provide positive motivations for caring about environmental conditions as a whole.

Download or read book From Sentience to Symbols written by John Pickering and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book After Cognitivism written by Karl Leidlmair and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a basic perplexity in our times. On the one hand, we ?nd a blind trust in technology and rationalism. In our neo-liberalistically dominated world only what can be rapidly exploited and commercialized seems to count. The only opposing reaction to this kind of rationalism is an extreme rejection of all kinds of reasoning, and sometimes attendant religious fundamentalism. But instead of re?ecting on the limits and possibilites of reasoning, dialogue is replaced by a demagogic struggle between cultures. One cause of the blind trust in technology is misunderstandings about the sign- cance and the application of theories in the reception of the so-called Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is essentially characterized by two forces: (i) the conception of society as a social contract and (ii) the new science (New- nian physics, etc.). But as a result we lost ground: Atomistic individualism nourished the illusion of a self-contained ego prior to man’s entering into a shared inter-subjective world. And in the new science, our constructions of reality became autonomous and indep- dent of our interventions. Thus we became caught in the inherent dynamism of our computational constructions of reality. Science, as it is applied today, operates with far too simple parameters and model-theoretic constructions – erroneously taking the latter (the models) as literal descriptions of reality.