Download or read book The Monkey in the Mirror written by Ian Tattersall and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2002 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fundamental questions of our origins, along with our evolutionary future, find new life in this extraordinary book. In this superb collection of essays, eminent scientist, Ian Tattersall takes up some of the most controversial questions in evolutionary history. He argues that far from being finely engineered organisms, we are in fact improvised beings, owing as much to chance as adaptation. Tattersall leads us around the world and into the far reaches of the past, and reveals the complexities of the science of human evolution.
Download or read book The Monkeys and the Mirror written by Sutton, Vi and published by . This book was released on 1983 with total page 13 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Myth of Mirror Neurons The Real Neuroscience of Communication and Cognition written by Gregory Hickok and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-08-18 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential reconsideration of one of the most far-reaching theories in modern neuroscience and psychology. In 1992, a group of neuroscientists from Parma, Italy, reported a new class of brain cells discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. These cells, later dubbed mirror neurons, responded equally well during the monkey’s own motor actions, such as grabbing an object, and while the monkey watched someone else perform similar motor actions. Researchers speculated that the neurons allowed the monkey to understand others by simulating their actions in its own brain. Mirror neurons soon jumped species and took human neuroscience and psychology by storm. In the late 1990s theorists showed how the cells provided an elegantly simple new way to explain the evolution of language, the development of human empathy, and the neural foundation of autism. In the years that followed, a stream of scientific studies implicated mirror neurons in everything from schizophrenia and drug abuse to sexual orientation and contagious yawning. In The Myth of Mirror Neurons, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reexamines the mirror neuron story and finds that it is built on a tenuous foundation—a pair of codependent assumptions about mirror neuron activity and human understanding. Drawing on a broad range of observations from work on animal behavior, modern neuroimaging, neurological disorders, and more, Hickok argues that the foundational assumptions fall flat in light of the facts. He then explores alternative explanations of mirror neuron function while illuminating crucial questions about human cognition and brain function: Why do humans imitate so prodigiously? How different are the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Why do we have two visual systems? Do we need to be able to talk to understand speech? What’s going wrong in autism? Can humans read minds? The Myth of Mirror Neurons not only delivers an instructive tale about the course of scientific progress—from discovery to theory to revision—but also provides deep insights into the organization and function of the human brain and the nature of communication and cognition.
Download or read book A Mirror for Monkeys written by John Spurling and published by Prelude Books. This book was released on 2021-04-22 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beneath the floorboards of a ruined house, an 18th-century memoir is discovered. It reveals the life story of William Congreve, the acclaimed English playwright. The lost manuscript is penned by his faithful servant, Jeremy, who tells how they lived together through fierce political division and triumphal nationalism in that era of war with France, the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. Upon his death a monument in Stowe is erected to honour Mr Congreve. Atop a slender pyramid sits a monkey peering into a mirror, a court wit seeing reflected the ironies of polite society folding in on itself as Whigs and Tories feud with scant ground for compromise. Through the prisms of memory and art, award-winning author John Spurling reimagines this tumultuous period and brings to life historical figures Dryden, Vanbrugh, Swift, Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as never before.
Download or read book The Monkey as Mirror written by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This tripartite study of the monkey metaphor, the monkey performance, and the 'special status' people traces changes in Japanese culture from the eighth century to the present. During early periods of Japanese history the monkey's nearness to the human-animal boundary made it a revered mediator or an animal deity closest to humans. Later it became a scapegoat mocked for its vain efforts to behave in a human fashion. Modern Japanese have begun to see a new meaning in the monkey--a clown who turns itself into an object of laughter while challenging the basic assumptions of Japanese culture and society.
Download or read book How the Brain Got Language written by Michael A. Arbib and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012-04-11 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike any other species, humans can learn and use language. This book explains how the brain evolved to make language possible, through what Michael Arbib calls the Mirror System Hypothesis. Because of mirror neurons, monkeys, chimps, and humans can learn by imitation, but only "complex imitation," which humans exhibit, is powerful enough to support the breakthrough to language. This theory provides a path from the openness of manual gesture, which we share with nonhuman primates, through the complex imitation of manual skills, pantomime, protosign (communication based on conventionalized manual gestures), and finally to protospeech. The theory explains why we humans are as capable of learning sign languages as we are of learning to speak. This fascinating book shows how cultural evolution took over from biological evolution for the transition from protolanguage to fully fledged languages. The author explains how the brain mechanisms that made the original emergence of languages possible, perhaps 100,000 years ago, are still operative today in the way children acquire language, in the way that new sign languages have emerged in recent decades, and in the historical processes of language change on a time scale from decades to centuries. Though the subject is complex, this book is highly readable, providing all the necessary background in primatology, neuroscience, and linguistics to make the book accessible to a general audience.
Download or read book Self Awareness in Animals and Humans written by Sue Taylor Parker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-05-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans and other species. This book focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. The focus of the chapters is both comparative and developmental.
Download or read book Monkey Sonatas written by Orson Scott Card and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1993-03-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of science fiction and fantasy tales by the acclaimed author offers readers ten excursions into the realm of the fantastic and the mythic. Orson Scott Card's Monkey Sonatas: Fables and Fantasies is part of the Maps in a Mirrors series of the author's extraordinary range of collected fiction. Introduction Unaccompanied Sonata A Cross-Country Trip to Kill Richard Nixon The Porcelain Salamander Middle Woman The Bully and the Beast The Princess and the Bear Sandmagic The Best Day A Plague of Butterflies The Monkeys Thought ‘Twas All in Fun Afterword At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Mirror The Monkey written by R. S. Deese and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A king who seeks to keep his kingdom safe and immaculate orders the destruction of a flower that he regards as pernicious weed, but soon finds that he has awakened the dragon who sleeps beneath a nearby mountain. The dragon takes her revenge on the king by eating his favorite horse and turning his firstborn son into a monkey. The king's angry reaction to this sets in motion a chain of events that will destroy his kingdom and scatter its people in all directions. In the midst of these events the young monkey will discover the pain of loss, the joy of love, and the secret of who he is.
Download or read book Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and Language written by Maxim I. Stamenov and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-12-17 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one’s own. The metaphor of ‘mirror’ aptly comes to mind.Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to ‘mirror’ other’s actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: ‘mirror neurons’. Quite remarkably, they are tuned to fire to the enaction as well as observation of specific classes of behavior: fine manual actions and actions performed by mouth. They become activated independent of the agent, be it the self or a third person whose action is observed. The activation in mirror neurons is automatic and binds the observation and enaction of some behavior by the self or by the observed other. The peculiar first-to-third-person ‘intersubjectivity’ of the performance of mirror neurons and their surprising complementarity to the functioning of strategic communicative face-to-face (first-to-second person) interaction may shed new light on the functional architecture of conscious vs. unconscious mental processes and the relationship between behavioral and communicative action in monkeys, primates, and humans. The present volume discusses the nature of mirror neurons as presented by the research team of Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti (University of Parma), who originally discovered them, and the implications to our understanding of the evolution of brain, mind and communicative interaction in non-human primates and man.(Series B)
Download or read book The Mirror Neuron System written by Christian Keysers and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2016-06 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mirror neurons are premotor neurons, originally discovered in the macaque brain , that discharge both during execution of goal-directed actions and during the observation of similar actions executed by another individual. They therefore ¿mirror¿ others¿ actions on the observer's motor repertoire. In the last decade an impressive amount of work has been devoted to the study of their properties and to investigate if they are present also in our species. Neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques have shown that a mirror-neuron system does exist in the human brain as well. Among ¿mirror¿ human areas, Broca¿s area (the frontal area for speech production) is almost constantly activated by action observation. This suggests a possible evolutionary link between action understanding and verbal communication. In the most recent years, mirror-like phenomena have been demonstrated also for domains others than the pure motor one. Examples of that are the somatosensory and the emotional systems, possibly providing a neurophysiological basis to phenomena such as embodiment and empathy. This special issue collects some of the most representative works on the mirror-neuron system to give a panoramic view on current research and to stimulate new experiments in this exciting field.
Download or read book The Monkeys of Arashiyama written by Linda M. Fedigan and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1991-07-03 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Monkeys of Arashiyama: Thirty-five Years of Research in Japan and the West, Linda Fedigan and Pamela Asquith reveal the diversity of research on the Arashiyama Japanese macaques, and the Japanese and Western traditions in primate studies. The essays reflect studies by primatologists with the population at Arashiyama, Kyoto, and the subgroup which fissioned from the original macaque group, transferred to Texas in 1972. It is a comprehensive examination of this major research group, highlighted by some of the new and interesting findings on primate social organization.
Download or read book Maps in a Mirror written by Orson Scott Card and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 686 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maps in a Mirror brings together nearly all of Orson Scott Card's short fiction written between 1977 and 1990. For those readers who have followed this remarkable talent since the beginning, here are all those amazing stories gathered together in one place, with some extra surprises as well. For the hundreds of thousands who are newly come to Card, here is chance to experience the wonder of a writer so versatile that he can handle everything from traditional narrative poetry to modern experimental fiction with equal ease and grace. The brilliant story-telling of the Alvin Maker books is no accident; the breathless excitement evoked by the Ender books is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In this enormous volume are forty-six stories, plus ten long, intensely personal essays, unique to this volume. In them the author reveals some of his reasons and motivations for writing, with a good deal of autobiography into the bargain. "One of the genre's most convincing storytellers. An important volume."--Library Journal At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Monkey in the Mirror written by Ian Tattersall and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “absorbing” look at how our species evolved, from the curator of human evolution at the American Museum of Natural History (Kirkus Reviews). What makes us so different from those other animals? How did we get this way? How do we know? And what exactly are we? These questions are what make human evolution a subject of general fascination. Ian Tattersall, one of those rare scientists who is also a graceful writer, addresses them in this delightful book. Tattersall leads the reader around the world and into the far reaches of the past, showing what the science of human evolution is up against—from the sparsity of evidence to the pressures of religious fundamentalism. Looking with dispassion and humor at our origins, Tattersall offers a wholly new definition of what it is to be human. “Unparalleled insight.” —Donald C. Johanson, author of Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind
Download or read book Curious George I Love You written by H. A. Rey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrate all the things you love about the little monkey in your life! What could be sweeter than a cuddly little monkey? With short, rhyming text, this book is the perfect gift to show your little monkey just how much you love them!
Download or read book Monkey Portraits written by Jill Greenberg and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2007-10-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jill Greenberg offers a fascinating, funny, and all-too-human collection of celebrity monkey and ape portraits. Each of these 76 amazing anthropomorphic photographs will remind readers of someone they know. Little, Brown and Company
Download or read book Macachiavellian Intelligence written by Dario Maestripieri and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judged by population size and distribution, homo sapiens are clearly the most successful primates. A close second, however, would be rhesus macaques, who have adapted to—and thrived in—such diverse environments as mountain forests, dry grasslands, and urban sprawl. Scientists have spent countless hours studying these opportunistic monkeys, but rhesus macaques have long been overshadowed in the public eye by the great apes, who, because of their greater intelligence, are naturally assumed to have more to teach us, both about other primates and about humans as well. Dario Maestripieri thinks it is high time we shelve that misperception, and with Macachiavellian Intelligence he gives rhesus macaques their rightful turn in the spotlight. The product of more than twenty years studying these fascinating creatures, Macachiavellian Intelligence caricatures a society that is as much human as monkey, with hierarchies and power struggles that would impress Machiavelli himself. High-status macaques, for instance, maintain their rank through deft uses of violence and manipulation, while altruism is almost unknown and relationships are perpetually subject to the cruel laws of the market. Throughout this eye-opening account, Maestripieri weds his thorough knowledge of macaque behavior to his abiding fascination with human society and motivations. The result is a book unlike any other, one that draws on economics as much as evolutionary biology, politics as much as primatology. Rife with unexpected connections and peppered with fascinating anecdotes, Macachiavellian Intelligence has as much to teach us about humans as it does about macaques, presenting a wry, rational, and wholly surprising view of our humanity as seen through the monkey in the mirror.
