Download or read book The Social Brain written by Tracey Camilleri and published by Random House. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A remarkable and important book . . . a highly accessible, timely and invaluable guide to anybody working in groups.' Prof Paul Gilbert OBE ___________________________________________________ How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand. They offer practical hints on how to diffuse tensions and encourage cooperation. And they demonstrate the vital importance of balancing unity and the need for different views and outlooks. By explaining precisely how the 'social brain' works, they show how human groups function and how to create great, high-performing teams. _____________________________________ 'This wonderful book reminds us that businesses are also biological and social . . . It could not be more timely, wise and useful.' Margaret Heffernan, author of Wilful Blindness 'Buy it for yourself and your colleagues. Essential reading.' Mark Earls, author of HERD

Download or read book Social Brain Distributed Mind written by Robin Dunbar and published by . This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The series includes thematic volumes that stem from symposia specially convened to address particular subjects. --Book Jacket.

Download or read book The Social Brain written by Jean Decety and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2020-08-18 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A range of empirical and theoretical perspectives on the relationship between biology and social cognition from infancy through childhood. Recent research on the developmental origins of the social mind supports the view that social cognition is present early in infancy and childhood in surprisingly sophisticated forms. Developmental psychologists have found ingenious ways to test the social abilities of infants and young children, and neuroscientists have begun to study the neurobiological mechanisms that implement and guide early social cognition. Their work suggests that, far from being unfinished adults, babies are exquisitely designed by evolution to capture relevant social information, learn, and explore their social environments. This volume offers a range of empirical and theoretical perspectives on the relationship between biology and social cognition from infancy through childhood. The contributors consider scientific advances in early social perception and cognition, including findings on the development of face processing and social perceptual biases; explore recent research on early infant competencies for language and theory of mind, including a developmental account of how young children become moral agents and the role of electrophysiology in identifying psychological processes that underpin social cognition; discuss the origins and development of prosocial behavior, reviewing evidence for a set of innate predispositions to be social, cooperative, and altruistic; examine how young children make social categories; and analyze atypical social cognition, including autism spectrum disorder and psychopathy. Contributors Lior Abramson, Renée Baillargeon, Pascal Belin, Frances Buttelmann, Sofia Cardenas, Michael J. Crowley, Fabrice Damon, Jean Decety, Michelle de Haan, Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, Melody Buyukozer Dawkins, Xiao Pan Ding, Kristen A. Dunfield, Rachel D. Fine, Ana Fló, Jennifer R. Frey, Susan A. Gelman, Diane Goldenberg, Marie-Hélène Grosbras, Tobias Grossmann, Caitlin M. Hudac, Dora Kampis, Tara A. Karasewich, Ariel Knafo-Noam, Tehila Kogut, Ágnes Melinda Kovács, Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Kang Lee, Narcis Marshall, Eamon McCrory, David Méary, Christos Panagiotopoulos, Olivier Pascalis, Markus Paulus, Kevin A. Pelphrey, Marcela Peña, Valerie F. Reyna, Marjorie Rhodes, Ruth Roberts, Hagit Sabato, Darby Saxbe, Virginia Slaughter, Jessica A. Sommerville, Maayan Stavans, Nikolaus Steinbeis, Fransisca Ting, Florina Uzefovsky, Essi Viding

Download or read book Lucy to Language written by R. I. M. Dunbar and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume readdresses the past contribution from archaeology towards the study of evolutionary issues, and ties evolutionary psychology into the extensive historical data from the past, allowing us to escape the confined timeframe of the comparatively recent human mind and explore the question of just what it is that makes us so different.

Download or read book Distributed Cognition and the Will written by Don Ross and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers and behavioral scientists discuss what, if anything, of the traditional concept of individual conscious will can survive recent scientific discoveries that human decision-making is distributed across different brain processes and through the social environment. Recent scientific findings about human decision making would seem to threaten the traditional concept of the individual conscious will. The will is threatened from "below" by the discovery that our apparently spontaneous actions are actually controlled and initiated from below the level of our conscious awareness, and from "above" by the recognition that we adapt our actions according to social dynamics of which we are seldom aware. In Distributed Cognition and the Will, leading philosophers and behavioral scientists consider how much, if anything, of the traditional concept of the individual conscious will survives these discoveries, and they assess the implications for our sense of freedom and responsibility. The contributors all take science seriously, and they are inspired by the idea that apparent threats to the cogency of the idea of will might instead become the basis of its reemergence as a scientific subject. They consider macro-scale issues of society and culture, the micro-scale dynamics of the mind/brain, and connections between macro-scale and micro-scale phenomena in the self-guidance and self-regulation of personal behavior. Contributors George Ainslie, Wayne Christensen, Andy Clark, Paul Sheldon Davies, Daniel C. Dennett, Lawrence A. Lengbeyer, Dan Lloyd, Philip Pettit, Don Ross, Tamler Sommers, Betsy Sparrow, Mariam Thalos, Jeffrey B. Vancouver, Daniel M. Wegner, Tadeusz W. Zawidzki

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 Thinking Big How the Evolution of Social Life Shaped the Human Mind written by Robin Dunbar and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A closer look at genealogy, incorporating how biological, anthropological, and technical factors can influence human lives We are at a pivotal moment in understanding our remote ancestry and its implications for how we live today. The barriers to what we can know about our distant relatives have been falling as a result of scientific advance, such as decoding the genomes of humans and Neanderthals, and bringing together different perspectives to answer common questions. These collaborations have brought new knowledge and suggested fresh concepts to examine. The results have shaken the old certainties. The results are profound; not just for the study of the past but for appreciating why we conduct our social lives in ways, and at scales, that are familiar to all of us. But such basic familiarity raises a dilemma. When surrounded by the myriad technical and cultural innovations that support our global, urbanized lifestyles we can lose sight of the small social worlds we actually inhabit and that can be traced deep into our ancestry. So why do we need art, religion, music, kinship, myths, and all the other facets of our over-active imaginations if the reality of our effective social worlds is set by a limit of some one hundred and fifty partners (Dunbar’s number) made of family, friends, and useful acquaintances? How could such a social community lead to a city the size of London or a country as large as China? Do we really carry our hominin past into our human present? It is these small worlds, and the link they allow to the study of the past that forms the central point in this book.

Download or read book Simple Minds written by Dan Edward Lloyd and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

Download or read book Social Intelligence written by Nathan Emery and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why are humans so clever? The 'Social intelligence' hypothesis explores the idea that this cleverness has evolved through the increasing complexity of social groups. Our ability to understand and control nature is a by-product of our ability to understand the mental states of others and to use this knowledge to co-operate or deceive. These abilities have not emerged out of the blue. They can be found in many social animals that co-operate and compete with one another, birds as well as mammals. This book brings together contributions from an impressive list of authorities in the field, appropriately concluding with a chapter by Nick Humphrey (one of the pioneers in this field). This volume examines social intelligence in many different animal species and explores its development, evolution and the brain systems upon which it depends. Better understanding and further development of social intelligence is critical for the future of the human race and the world that we inhabit. Our problems will not be solved by mere cleverness, but by increased social co-operation.

Download or read book A Cooperative Species written by Samuel Bowles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-31 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at the evolutionary origins of cooperation Why do humans, uniquely among animals, cooperate in large numbers to advance projects for the common good? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in biology and economics, this generous and civic-minded behavior is widespread and cannot be explained simply by far-sighted self-interest or a desire to help close genealogical kin. In A Cooperative Species, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis—pioneers in the new experimental and evolutionary science of human behavior—show that the central issue is not why selfish people act generously, but instead how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a species in which substantial numbers make sacrifices to uphold ethical norms and to help even total strangers. The authors describe how, for thousands of generations, cooperation with fellow group members has been essential to survival. Groups that created institutions to protect the civic-minded from exploitation by the selfish flourished and prevailed in conflicts with less cooperative groups. Key to this process was the evolution of social emotions such as shame and guilt, and our capacity to internalize social norms so that acting ethically became a personal goal rather than simply a prudent way to avoid punishment. Using experimental, archaeological, genetic, and ethnographic data to calibrate models of the coevolution of genes and culture as well as prehistoric warfare and other forms of group competition, A Cooperative Species provides a compelling and novel account of how humans came to be moral and cooperative.

Download or read book The Cognitive Neuroscience of Mind written by Michael S. Gazzaniga and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays on a range of topics in the cognitive neurosciences report on the progress in the field over the twenty years of its existence and reflect the many groundbreaking scientific contributions and enduring influence of Michael Gazzaniga, 'the godfather of cognitive neuroscience'.

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 Active Inference written by Thomas Parr and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding sentient behavior—a theory that characterizes perception, planning, and action in terms of probabilistic inference. Developed by theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston over years of groundbreaking research, active inference provides an integrated perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior that is increasingly used across multiple disciplines including neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. Active inference puts the action into perception. This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of active inference, covering theory, applications, and cognitive domains. Active inference is a “first principles” approach to understanding behavior and the brain, framed in terms of a single imperative to minimize free energy. The book emphasizes the implications of the free energy principle for understanding how the brain works. It first introduces active inference both conceptually and formally, contextualizing it within current theories of cognition. It then provides specific examples of computational models that use active inference to explain such cognitive phenomena as perception, attention, memory, and planning.

Download or read book The Interoceptive Mind written by Manos Tsakiris and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of sensations that originates from the internal body and visceral organs. The Interoceptive Mind: From Homeostasis to Awareness offers a state-of-the-art overview of, and insights into, the role of interoception for mental life, awareness, subjectivity, affect, and cognition.

Download or read book The Spontaneous Brain written by Georg Northoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-08-06 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An argument for a Copernican revolution in our consideration of mental features—a shift in which the world-brain problem supersedes the mind-body problem. Philosophers have long debated the mind-body problem—whether to attribute such mental features as consciousness to mind or to body. Meanwhile, neuroscientists search for empirical answers, seeking neural correlates for consciousness, self, and free will. In this book, Georg Northoff does not propose new solutions to the mind-body problem; instead, he questions the problem itself, arguing that it is an empirically, ontologically, and conceptually implausible way to address the existence and reality of mental features. We are better off, he contends, by addressing consciousness and other mental features in terms of the relationship between world and brain; philosophers should consider the world-brain problem rather than the mind-body problem. This calls for a Copernican shift in vantage point—from within the mind or brain to beyond the brain—in our consideration of mental features. Northoff, a neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and philosopher, explains that empirical evidence suggests that the brain's spontaneous activity and its spatiotemporal structure are central to aligning and integrating the brain within the world. This spatiotemporal structure allows the brain to extend beyond itself into body and world, creating the “world-brain relation” that is central to mental features. Northoff makes his argument in empirical, ontological, and epistemic-methodological terms. He discusses current models of the brain and applies these models to recent data on neuronal features underlying consciousness and proposes the world-brain relation as the ontological predisposition for consciousness.

Download or read book How Things Shape the Mind written by Lambros Malafouris and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-12 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the different ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body, from prehistory to the present. An increasingly influential school of thought in cognitive science views the mind as embodied, extended, and distributed rather than brain-bound or “all in the head.” This shift in perspective raises important questions about the relationship between cognition and material culture, posing major challenges for philosophy, cognitive science, archaeology, and anthropology. In How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris proposes a cross-disciplinary analytical framework for investigating the ways in which things have become cognitive extensions of the human body. Using a variety of examples and case studies, he considers how those ways might have changed from earliest prehistory to the present. Malafouris's Material Engagement Theory definitively adds materiality—the world of things, artifacts, and material signs—into the cognitive equation. His account not only questions conventional intuitions about the boundaries and location of the human mind but also suggests that we rethink classical archaeological assumptions about human cognitive evolution.

Download or read book Society Of Mind written by Marvin Minsky and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1988-03-15 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.