Download or read book Landscape of the Mind written by John F. Hoffecker and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Landscape of the Mind, John F. Hoffecker explores the origin and growth of the human mind, drawing on archaeology, history, and the fossil record. He suggests that, as an indirect result of bipedal locomotion, early humans developed a feedback relationship among their hands, brains, and tools that evolved into the capacity to externalize thoughts in the form of shaped stone objects. When anatomically modern humans evolved a parallel capacity to externalize thoughts as symbolic language, individual brains within social groups became integrated into a "neocortical Internet," or super-brain, giving birth to the mind. Noting that archaeological traces of symbolism coincide with evidence of the ability to generate novel technology, Hoffecker contends that human creativity, as well as higher order consciousness, is a product of the superbrain. He equates the subsequent growth of the mind with human history, which began in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. As anatomically modern humans spread across the globe, adapting to a variety of climates and habitats, they redesigned themselves technologically and created alternative realities through tools, language, and art. Hoffecker connects the rise of civilization to a hierarchical reorganization of the super-brain, triggered by explosive population growth. Subsequent human history reflects to varying degrees the suppression of the mind's creative powers by the rigid hierarchies of nationstates and empires, constraining the further accumulation of knowledge. The modern world emerged after 1200 from the fragments of the Roman Empire, whose collapse had eliminated a central authority that could thwart innovation. Hoffecker concludes with speculation about the possibility of artificial intelligence and the consequences of a mind liberated from its organic antecedents to exist in an independent, nonbiological form.
Download or read book Landscapes of the Mind written by John Douglas Porteous and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Refers in particular to Graham Greene and Malcolm Lowry.
Download or read book Exploring the Landscape of the Mind written by Stephen S. Clark and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is based on the premise that humankind is, first and foremost, the outcome of the process of biological evolution. Recognition of this is fundamental to our understanding of who we are and how we behave. All living things have evolved the physical and mental attributes that promote their prospects for survival; they are good at doing the things that enable them to pass on their genes to succeeding generations, and we are no exception. Of course, through the development of culture, we have gained some freedom from our biological origins. Nevertheless, evolution has constructed the foundation upon which culture is built. The first part of the book, Ourselves Interacting with the World, presents an overview of the main capabilities that evolution has endowed us with and that enable us to interact with the environment in advantageous ways. This includes our senses, which act as windows on the world and also, of great importance, our emotions and ability to remember. Our ability to think is perhaps the crowning achievement of our evolutionary journey, and, of course, we must be able to act in a timely and effective manner. The second part of the book, Living Together, traces the history of how we became social creatures. To be truly human, we had to be capable of sharing and cooperation. We also needed to be able to control our aggressiveness and talent for deception. We settled down, making the transition from hunter-gatherers to urban dwellers, and agreed upon values and norms of behavior that enhanced our ability to get along. Ultimately, we came to see good and bad as a morality of right and wrong, further augmenting group cohesiveness. In the final part of the book, Challenges and Opportunities, attention turns to a consideration of the constraints and possibilities that must be considered in looking to the future. These realities can be seen to play out in four social arenas: the pursuit of fairness, the seeking of justice, the interplay of political beliefs and good government, and ultimately, a united society that is, at the same time, a true community. Our quest for these things will be greatly aided by a deep knowledge and appreciation of our evolutionary past and the indelible imprint it has left upon us. It may even lead us to that most elusive of all things, happiness.
Download or read book Landscapes of the Mind written by Lawrence L. LeShan and published by . This book was released on 2012-08-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Linneaus did for biology, LeShan does for human consciousness and behavior - provide a classification system for aspects and states of consciousness. This framework contains both the objective and subjective aspects of life and shows that they can be intelligibly connected.
Download or read book The Landscape of the Mind written by Richard C. Poulsen and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Landscape with Dragons written by Michael D. O'Brien and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Harry Potter series of books and movies are wildly popular. Many Christians see the books as largely if not entirely harmless. Others regard them as dangerous and misleading. In his book A Landscape with Dragons, Harry Potter critic Michael O'Brien examines contemporary children's literature and finds it spiritually and morally wanting. His analysis, written before the rise of the popular Potter books and films, anticipates many of the problems Harry Potter critics point to. A Landscape with Dragons is a controversial, yet thoughtful study of what millions of young people are reading and the possible impact such reading may have on them. In this study of the pagan invasion of children's culture, O'Brien, the father of six, describes his own coming to terms with the effect it has had on his family and on most families in Western society. His analysis of the degeneration of books, films, and videos for the young is incisive and detailed. Yet his approach is not simply critical, for he suggests a number of remedies, including several tools of discernment for parents and teachers in assessing the moral content and spiritual impact of this insidious revolution. In doing so, he points the way to rediscovery of time-tested sources, and to new developments in Christian culture. If you have ever wondered why a certain children's book or film made you feel uneasy, but you couldn't figure out why, this book is just what you need. This completely revised, much expanded second edition also includes a very substantial recommended reading list of over 1,000 books for kindergarten through highschool.
Download or read book Exploring the Landscape of the Mind written by Janet Lee Bachant and published by Ipbooks. This book was released on 2019-09 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychotherapy is an adventure into uncharted territory--the landscape of the mind. As therapists, beginning a treatment takes us on a journey into the unmapped interior of a person's soul. We do not know what awesome vistas, formidable obstacles and strange inhabitants we will encounter. But we do know that the exploration of the self is the path to finding answers to some of life's greatest personal mysteries such as How did I become the person I am? How can I address the mystery of my problems in living? What do I really want? Who am I? Psychodynamic treatment is akin to the great voyages of discovery in which significant danger are faced but the rewards of discovery outweigh the difficulties of the journey (Levin, 2017). On all such encounters, each participant has a necessary role to play as they together embark on an adventure that has no equal. Uncovering complex mental processes (many of which are unconscious) in the context of an ongoing, intimate relationship is the core of psychodynamic therapy. It demands intellectual understanding, emotional connectedness and, ideally, a sense of humor to help keep things in perspective. Doing psychotherapy tests patient and therapist alike, asking them both to deal with fears, tensions, losses, limitations, exposure and maintaining a focus on the growing edge of development through the inevitable setbacks and disappointments. But it also provides an arena for authentic relatedness and a commitment to the collaborative work of knowing a person's internal life. The potential for understanding generated by psychotherapy is unrivaled. Shedler (2010) reports the recurring finding that "the benefits of psychodynamic therapy not only endure but increase with time" in contrast to non-dynamic therapies whose gains decay over time (p. 102-103). In the words of students who have captured the essence succinctly: "It goes deeper." "It goes to the heart." The primary function of this book is to help the reader begin a voyage of discovery. While everyone's path will be different, there are steps each of us can take to understand the minds of others and thereby to organize our own as therapists. The techniques developed in this book focus primarily on the ordinary processes of mental organization, processes that are determined by the interaction of biological, emotional and interpersonal factors during the child's early years. In addition to addressing how normal development informs psychodynamic technique, this book also highlights the long-term effects of traumatic emotional experiences on the child's mental functioning.
Download or read book Plato s Camera written by Paul M. Churchland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-01-20 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A noted philosopher draws on the empirical results and conceptual resources of cognitive neuroscience to address questions about the nature of knowledge. In Plato's Camera, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation—or "takes a picture"—of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories to which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures.
Download or read book Edvard Munch Harald Sohlberg written by Øivind Storm Bjerke and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eng. National acadamy of design, 1995. 266 s., ill. ISBN 1-887149-01-5 Denne boken ble utgitt samtidig med åpningen av en maleriutstilling av Edvard Munchs og Harald Solbergs bilder i National Acadamy of Design. Munchsarbeider er velkjent, men Solbergs arbeider har aldri tidligere vært vist utenfor Norge. Derfor var det viktig å presentere Solberg sammen Munch for det amerikanske publikum. Boken gir derfor en fyldig presentasjon av Sol- bergs liv og arbeid. Den presenterer også de to kunstnernes holdning til norske kunstnerkretser, for deretter å vise samtlige av utstillingens bilder, først i tekst og så i bilder. Flotte farveillustrasjoner.
Download or read book Brain Landscape The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture written by John P. Eberhard and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture is the first book to serve as an intellectual bridge between architectural practice and neuroscience research. John P. Eberhard, founding President of the non-profit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, argues that increased funding, and the ability to think beyond the norm, will lead to a better understanding of how scientific research can change how we design, illuminate, and build spaces. Inversely, he posits that by better understanding the effects that buildings and places have on us, and our mental state, the better we may be able to understand how the human brain works. This book is devoted to describing architectural design criteria for schools, offices, laboratories, memorials, churches, and facilities for the aging, and then posing hypotheses about human experiences in such settings.
Download or read book Journey Back to Me written by SD Ferguson and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2017-12-11 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consistent with the most recent research in brain science on fear and happiness, this imaginative tale gift wraps all the power of a groundbreaking self-help book into one rollercoaster of a story. Colorful, thought-provoking lessons stay with the reader long after finishing the last page. A car accident leaves Liza, a successful single mom, unconscious. Trapped inside her subconscious and hijacked by her imagination, Liza learns firsthand how her thinking shapes her life. Her thoughts carry her away to dangerous and mysterious places, each gifting a lesson of how fear influences her thoughts, beliefs and the fullness of love in her relationships. Happiness, she discovers, is a function of her thinking. During her journey Liza uncovers secrets to rid herself of the fear-based behaviors that are inconsistent with her true self. To her delight, breaking free from the shackles of fear is simpler than she ever dreamed. Happiness is just a thought away...with practice. The book serves as an ongoing resource for those interested in the art of intentional living.
Download or read book Mind s Landscape written by Samuel Guttenplan and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2000-09-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mind's Landscape is an engaging introduction to the philosophical study of mind and an elegantly persuasive account of how best to understand the nature of mental phenomena. It serves as both a text and as a contribution to the philosophy of mind. Its engaging narrative style will appeal to students, instructors, and general readers alike.
Download or read book Mapping the Mind written by Rita Carter and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A smart, current, and witty introduction to brain science. Accompanied by illustrations, examples of cutting edge imaging technologies, and sidebars by key neuroscientists.
Download or read book Landscapes of Fear written by Yi-Fu Tuan and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To be human is to experience fear, but what is it exactly that makes us fearful? Here is one geographer’s striking exploration of our landscapes of fear as they change throughout our lives and have changed throughout history. Yi-fu Tuan investigates landscapes of the natural environment which are threatening, and landscapes filled with the dark imageries of the mind; fears of drought, flood, famine, and disease, shared by all members of a community, and fears of the particular ghosts which haunt the individual imagination. In this lucidly-written, ground-breaking survey, Professor Tuan delves into many cultures and reaches back into our prehistory to discover what is universal and what is particular in our inheritance of fear. Starting with fear in animals, he raises and explores a variety of questions: What is specifically human about fear? Is there or has there ever been a “fearless” society? Professor Tuan examines the most specific forms fear takes in the mind of the child, among hunters and agriculturists, inside the walls of a medieval Chinese city, among Navaho Indians and American immigrants. He explores the ways in which authorities create landscapes of terror to instill fear in their own populations; and he probes that most basic of all contradictions between the need for human security and the fear of human nature. Professor Tuan particularly emphasizes how, in coping with fears of enemies, strangers, the insane, wolves, wind, witches, mountains, dragons, rain, or the terror that the universe itself might crumble, humans respond adventurously by creating “shelters,” ranging from fairy tales to cosmological myths. We watch as human beings continually draw and redraw their “circles of safety,” never feeling entirely at peace within them.
Download or read book Painting the Landscape of Your Soul written by Damini Celebre and published by . This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painting the Landscape of Your Soul engages and reawakens your innate creativity as a path to self discovery. This book is a step-by-step journey of empowerment, reclaiming your inner self with paint and paper. It incorporates trusting your intuitive voice with deep, underlying principles of healing such as energy medicine and shamanism. It's a journey toward integration and wholeness and will bring a twinkle to your eyes again! No artistic skill is required."
Download or read book The Language of Landscape written by Anne Whiston Spirn and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes. Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.
Download or read book A Country in Mind written by Saskia Beudel and published by Apollo Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chunk of land bordering Western Australia, South Australia, and Queensland is known as Namatjira. For most of us it is remote; geographically and metaphorically it is the heart of Australia. After a period of loss and much change, Saskia Beudel was inspired to begin long distance walking. Within 18 months, she had walked Australia's Snowy Mountains, twice along the South Coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. Throughout the course of her journeys, she experienced passages of reverie, of forgetfulness, of absorption in her surroundings, of an immense but simple pleasure, and of rhythm. The book that emerged contrasts her internal landscape with the external landscape, considering her relationships with her family in the context of environmental and anthropological histories. It champions the history of Australia's Namatjira country and conveys social and environmental issues. A Country in Mind is a narrative memoir of one woman's reflections on home, family, and belonging, while traversing remote and ancient landscapes. *** "The Australian Outback is depicted with such gorgeous language in Beudel's book that it almost feels as though you're seeing it with your own eyes. There is, however, more to this book than just description. The history and spirituality of the region is the glue that binds this alluring memoir together and turns it into a journey through Australia unlike any other." - World Literature Today, Jan/Feb 2015Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?Ã?Â?
