Download or read book From Perception to Pleasure written by Robert J. Zatorre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Our species has been making music most likely for as long as we've been human. It seems to be an indelible a part of us. The oldest known musical instruments date back to the upper paleolithic period, some 40,000 years ago. Among the most intriguing of these are delicate bone flutes, seen in Figure 1.1, found in what is now southern Germany. (Conard et al. 2009). These discoveries testify to the advanced technology that our ancestors applied to create music: the finger holes are carefully bevelled to allow the musician's fingers to make a tight seal; and the distances between the holes appear to have been precisely measured, perhaps to correspond to a specific musical scale. This time period corresponds to the last glaciation episode in the northern hemisphere -- life could not have been easy for people living at that time. Yet time, energy, and the skills of craftworkers were expended for making abstract sounds "of the least use ... to daily habits of life". So, music must have been very meaningful and important for them. Why would that be?"--

Download or read book In the Light of Evolution written by National Academy of Sciences and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humans possess certain unique mental traits. Self-reflection, as well as ethic and aesthetic values, is among them, constituting an essential part of what we call the human condition. The human mental machinery led our species to have a self-awareness but, at the same time, a sense of justice, willing to punish unfair actions even if the consequences of such outrages harm our own interests. Also, we appreciate searching for novelties, listening to music, viewing beautiful pictures, or living in well-designed houses. But why is this so? What is the meaning of our tendency, among other particularities, to defend and share values, to evaluate the rectitude of our actions and the beauty of our surroundings? What brain mechanisms correlate with the human capacity to maintain inner speech, or to carry out judgments of value? To what extent are they different from other primates' equivalent behaviors? In the Light of Evolution Volume VII aims to survey what has been learned about the human "mental machinery." This book is a collection of colloquium papers from the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium "The Human Mental Machinery," which was sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences on January 11-12, 2013. The colloquium brought together leading scientists who have worked on brain and mental traits. Their 16 contributions focus the objective of better understanding human brain processes, their evolution, and their eventual shared mechanisms with other animals. The articles are grouped into three primary sections: current study of the mind-brain relationships; the primate evolutionary continuity; and the human difference: from ethics to aesthetics. This book offers fresh perspectives coming from interdisciplinary approaches that open new research fields and constitute the state of the art in some important aspects of the mind-brain relationships.

Download or read book Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward written by Jay A. Gottfried and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Synthesizing coverage of sensation and reward into a comprehensive systems overview, Neurobiology of Sensation and Reward presents a cutting-edge and multidisciplinary approach to the interplay of sensory and reward processing in the brain. While over the past 70 years these areas have drifted apart, this book makes a case for reuniting sensation a

Download or read book Plotinus and Epicurus written by Angela Longo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-08-03 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes a new way of understanding themes such as matter, knowledge, human happiness and the gods in Epicurus and Plotinus.

Download or read book Action in Perception written by Alva Noë and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2006-01-20 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Perception is not something that happens to us, or in us," writes Alva Noë. "It is something we do." In Action in Perception, Noë argues that perception and perceptual consciousness depend on capacities for action and thought—that perception is a kind of thoughtful activity. Touch, not vision, should be our model for perception. Perception is not a process in the brain, but a kind of skillful activity of the body as a whole. We enact our perceptual experience. To perceive, according to this enactive approach to perception, is not merely to have sensations; it is to have sensations that we understand. In Action in Perception, Noë investigates the forms this understanding can take. He begins by arguing, on both phenomenological and empirical grounds, that the content of perception is not like the content of a picture; the world is not given to consciousness all at once but is gained gradually by active inquiry and exploration. Noë then argues that perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession and exercise of practical bodily knowledge, and examines, among other topics, the problems posed by spatial content and the experience of color. He considers the perspectival aspect of the representational content of experience and assesses the place of thought and understanding in experience. Finally, he explores the implications of the enactive approach for our understanding of the neuroscience of perception.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Rhythm written by Russell Hartenberger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-24 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

Download or read book Multisensory Flavor Perception written by Betina Piqueras-Fiszman and published by Woodhead Publishing. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multisensory Flavor Perception: From Fundamental Neuroscience Through to the Marketplace provides state-of-the-art coverage of the latest insights from the rapidly-expanding world of multisensory flavor research. The book highlights the various types of crossmodal interactions, such as sound and taste, and vision and taste, showing their impact on sensory and hedonic perception, along with their consumption in the context of food and drink. The chapters in this edited volume review the existing literature, also explaining the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms which lead to crossmodal perception of flavor. The book brings together research which has not been presented before, making it the first book in the market to cover the literature of multisensory flavor perception by incorporating the latest in psychophysics and neuroscience. - Authored by top academics and world leaders in the field - Takes readers on a journey from the neurological underpinnings of multisensory flavor perception, then presenting insights that can be used by food companies to create better flavor sensations for consumers - Offers a wide perspective on multisensory flavor perception, an area of rapidly expanding knowledge

Download or read book The Entangled Brain written by Luiz Pessoa and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ. Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger question: What kind of object is the brain? Neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa describes the brain as a highly networked, interconnected system that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. One can’t point to the brain and say, “This is where emotion happens” (or any other mental faculty). Pessoa argues that only by understanding how large-scale neural circuits combine multiple and diverse signals can we truly appreciate how the brain supports the mind. Presenting the brain as an integrated organ and drawing on neuroscience, computation, mathematics, systems theory, and evolution, The Entangled Brain explains how brain functions result from cross-cutting brain processing, not the function of segregated areas. Parts of the brain work in a coordinated fashion across large-scale distributed networks in which disparate parts of the cortex and the subcortex work simultaneously to bring about behaviors. Pessoa intuitively explains the concepts needed to formalize this idea of the brain as a complex system and how to unleash powerful understandings built with “collective computations.”

Download or read book Origins of Architectural Pleasure written by Grant Hildebrand and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-06-30 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging study discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing--and useful for survival--from ancient times to the present. 119 photos. 6 line figures.

Download or read book Pleasures of the Brain written by Morten L. Kringelbach and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2010 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pleasure is fundamental to well-being and the quality of life, but until recently, was barely explored by science. Current research on pleasure has brought about ground-breaking developments on several fronts, and new data on pleasure and the brain have begun to converge from many disparate fields. The time is ripe to present these important findings in a single volume, and so Morten Kringelbach and Kent Berridge have brought together the leading researchers to provides a comprehensive review of our current scientific understanding of pleasure. The authors present their latest neuroscientific research into pleasure, describing studies on the brain's role in pleasure and reward in animals and humans, including brain mechanisms, neuroimaging data, and psychological analyses, as well as how their findings have been applied to clinical problems, such as depression and other disorders of hedonic well-being. To clarify the differences between their views, the researchers also provide short answers to a set of fundamental questions about pleasure and its relation to the brain. This book is intended to serve as both a starting point for readers new to the field, and as a reference for more experienced graduate students and scientists from fields such as neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, and neurosurgery.

Download or read book A History of the Senses written by Robert Jütte and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jutte charts the development of our attitudes and relationships to our senses from antiquity through to the 20th century, creating a tapestry of different traditions, images, metaphors, and ideas that have survived through time.

Download or read book Dopamine Nation written by Dr. Anna Lembke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-01-03 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES and LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER “Brilliant . . . riveting, scary, cogent, and cleverly argued.”—Beth Macy, author of Dopesick, as heard on Fresh Air This book is about pleasure. It’s also about pain. Most important, it’s about how to find the delicate balance between the two, and why now more than ever finding balance is essential. We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . The increased numbers, variety, and potency is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation. As such we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption. In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke, psychiatrist and author, explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain . . . and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check. The lived experiences of her patients are the gripping fabric of her narrative. Their riveting stories of suffering and redemption give us all hope for managing our consumption and transforming our lives. In essence, Dopamine Nation shows that the secret to finding balance is combining the science of desire with the wisdom of recovery.

Download or read book Phenomenology of Perception written by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and published by Motilal Banarsidass Publishe. This book was released on 1996 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buddhist philosophy of Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering), and

Download or read book Fundamentals of Sensory Perception Making Sense in Psychology Pack written by Avi Chaudhuri and published by . This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive introduction to the senses explains how physical stimuli are transformed into signals in the nervous system and how the brain uses those signals to understand the world. Whereas most texts in the field begin by covering vision, this trailblazing work offers students a solidgrounding in the principles of perceptual measurement and the biological mechanisms that make perception possible before introducing the somatosensory and then the olfactory system. This innovative presentation ensures that students have a firm grasp of the basics before they approach thecomplexities of hearing and vision, making Fundamentals of Sensory Perception an indispensable introduction to sensation and perception.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception written by Mohan Matthen and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topics covered; together they demonstrate the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.

Download or read book Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis written by David Mann and published by Frenis Zero. This book was released on 2014-08-13 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book gathers some papers concerning the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Following the Introduction written by Georg Northoff, concerning the possibility of overcoming the highly impasse generating contraposition between localizationism and holism, G. Vaslamatzis deals with a “Framework for a new dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurosciences”. In this chapter the author describes three points of epistemological congruence: firstly, dualism is no longer a satisfactory solution; secondly, cautions for the centrality of interpretation (hermeneutics); and, thirdly, the self-criticism of neuroscientists. David W.Mann in his contribution “The mirror crack’d: dissociation and reflexivity in self and group phenomena” tries to show how reflexive processes generate each of three levels of the human system (self, relationships, group) and integrate them one to another, while dissociative processes tend throughout to pull them apart. Health and illness within the self, the relationship and the group can be understood as special states of the dynamic equilibria between these cohesive and dispersive trends. In “Sleep, memory and plasticity” Matthew P. Walker and Robert Stickgold outline a review of the researches following the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) sleep, and specifically of those that began testing the hypothesis that sleep, or even specific stages of sleep, actively participated in the process of memory development. The last two chapters, “Clinical implications of neuroscience research in PTSD” by Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, and “Dysregulation of the right brain: a fundamental mechanism of traumatic attachment and the psychopathogenesis of PTSD” by Allan N. Schore, demonstrate how the psychopathology of traumatic conditions can be a fertile field of dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.

Download or read book The Birth of Pleasure written by Carol Gilligan and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2003-08-12 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of the classic In a Different Voice offers a brilliant, provocative book about love that has powerful implications for the way we live and love today. “Compelling ... A thrilling new paradigm.” —The Times Literary Supplement Carol Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now asks: Why is love so often associated with tragedy? Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels.