Could a single human being ever have multiple conscious minds? Some human beings do. The corpus callosum is a large pathway connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. In the second half of the twentieth century a number of people had this pathway cut through as a treatment for epilepsy. They became colloquially known as split-brain subjects. After the two hemispheres of the brain are cortically separated in this way, they begin to operate unusually independently of each other in the realm of thought, action, and conscious experience, almost as if each hemisphere now had a mind of its own. Philosophical discussion of the split-brain cases has overwhelmingly focused on questions of psychological identity in split-brain subjects, questions like: how many subjects of experience is a split-brain subject? How many intentional agents? How many persons? On the one hand, under experimental conditions, split-brain subjects often act in ways difficult to understand except in terms of each of them having two distinct streams or centers of consciousness. Split-brain subjects thus evoke the duality intuition: that a single split-brain human being is somehow composed of two thinking, experiencing, and acting things. On the other hand, a split-brain subject nonetheless seems like one of us, at the end of the day, rather than like two people sharing one body. In other words, split-brain subjects also evoke the unity intuition: that a split-brain subject is one person. Elizabeth Schechter argues that there are in fact two minds, subjects of experience, and intentional agents inside each split-brain human being: right and left. On the other hand, each split-brain subject is nonetheless one of us. The key to reconciling these two claims is to understand the ways in which each of us is transformed by self-consciousness.

"Beginning with the view that human consciousness is essentially embodied and that the way we consciously experience the world is structured by our bodily dynamics and surroundings, the book argues that emotions are a fundamental manifestation of our embodiment, and play a crucial role in self-consciousness, moral evaluation, and social cognition"--

This volume contains a contemporary, integrated description of the processes of language. These range from fast scales (fractions of a second) to slow ones (over a million years). The contributors, all experts in their fields, address language in the brain, production of sentences and dialogues, language learning, transmission and evolutionary processes that happen over centuries or millenia, the relation between language and genes, the origins of language, self-organization, and language competition and death. The book as a whole will help to show how processes at different scales affect each other, thus presenting language as a dynamic, complex and profoundly human phenomenon.

Although current debates in epistemology and philosophy of mind show a renewed interest in perceptual illusions, there is no systematic work in the philosophy of perception and in the psychology of perception with respect to the concept of illusion and the relation between illusion and error. This book aims to fill that gap.

This volume brings different perspectives to bear on the the architecture of the mind and the relationship between language and cognition. It considers how information is linked in the mind between different cognitive and expressive levels - so that people can, for example, talk about what they see and act upon what they hear - and how these linkages are and need to be constrained. It focuses in particular on the perception and representation of spatial structure. In the opening chapter, the editors address the general issues underlying current research and set each chapter in context. The book is then divided into four parts. The first two discuss the properties of the conceptual to syntactic structure interface and the conceptual to spatial structure interface. Part three examines constraints on the lexical interface and the different kinds of cognitive information in word representations. Part four considers how the neural architecture of the brain constrains mapping relations between different kinds of cognitive information. The authors are psychologists and linguists.

Every time you consult a calendar or clock, other people are thinking for you. Most users of these tools only know how to interpret the representations of time these objects provide, not the logics behind the representations. Those logics were others' ideas. This book looks at how the objects we use to think about time shape our thoughts. Such objects empower us to think about time certain ways, but they also contain hidden assumptions about time that deflect our awareness away from the complicated rhythms of our lives and our world. Because time ties together so many aspects of our lives, this book is able to explore the nexus of objects, cognition, culture, and even biology, and to do so in relationship to

The book "Paradigm Shift for Future Tennis" starts with revelations that make obvious the limitations of today's tennis, which does not use the laws of modern Biomechanics and Neurophysiology. The second part of the book includes a new approach to the quantum mind of a champion. It will reveal the secret weapon of Roger Federer and the blueprint of a future tennis champion. This book will expose the new tennis shot emerging from the field of sports science. It is a real weapon, which can generate a ball-speed similar to that of the first serve: the Power High-Forehand. Its aim is to generate maximal possible racket-head speed while players do not wait for the ball to bounce. This is both a tactical and psychological basis for the future tennis game. This aggressive interceptive psychology will shape the minds of future tennis champions. High racket-head speed can be achieved using the stretch-reflex, without big loops and swings. Weapons of a future tennis game will comprise of whip-like tennis serves and ground strokes, based on the stretch-reflex, and using the whole body in a fluid and integrated manner, thus manifesting a superb combination of speed and strength. Restructure your brain and apply the power of state of the art biomechanical, mathematical, medical, neural, cognitive, and quantum computational intelligence to understand the tennis of today and the future

This interdisciplinary work presents an integration of theory and research on how children develop their thinking as they participate in cultural activity with the guidance and challenge of their caregivers and other companions. The author, a leading developmental psychologist, views development as an apprenticeship in which children engage in the use of intellectual tools in societally structured activities with parents, other adults, and children. The author has gathered evidence from various disciplines--cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; anthropology; infancy studies; and communication research--furnishing a coherent and broadly based account of cognitive development in its sociocultural context. This work examines the mutual roles of the individual and the sociocultural world, and the culturally based processes by which children appropriate and extend skill and understanding from their involvement in shared thinking with other people. The book is written in a lively and engaging style and is supplemented by photographs and original illustrations by the author.

This comprehensive volume provides teachers, researchers and education professionals with cutting edge knowledge developed in the last decades by the educational, behavioural and neurosciences, integrating cognitive, developmental and socioeconomic approaches to deal with the problems children face in learning mathematics. The neurocognitive mechanisms and the cognitive processes underlying acquisition of arithmetic abilities and their significance for education have been the subject of intense research in the last few decades, but the most part of this research has been conducted in non-applied settings and there's still a deep discrepancy between the level of scientific knowledge and its implementation into actual educational settings. Now it's time to bring the results from the laboratory to the classroom. Apart from bringing the theoretical discussions to educational settings, the volume presents a wide range of methods for early detection of children with risks in mathematics learning and strategies to develop effective interventions based on innovative cognitive test instruments. It also provides insights to translate research knowledge into public policies in order to address socioeconomic issues. And it does so from an international perspective, dedicating a whole section to the cultural diversity of mathematics learning difficulties in different parts of the world. All of this makes the International Handbook of Mathematical Learning Difficulties an essential tool for those involved in the daily struggle to prepare the future generations to succeed in the global knowledge society.

This book is a succinct introduction to the orienting of attention. Richard Wright and Lawrence Ward describe the covert orienting literature clearly and concisely, illustrating it with numerous high-quality images, specifically designed to make the challenging theoretical concepts very accessible. The book begins with an historical introduction that provides a great deal of information about orienting, much of which will be new even to seasoned researchers. Wright and Ward then systematically describe the development of various experimental paradigms that have been devised to study covert orienting, and the theoretical issues raised by this research. One trend that they analyze in detail is the progression from relatively simple models of spatial attention (attention spotlight and zoom lens models) to an integrative computational framework based on a concept called the "activity distribution." They also present a comprehensive survey of cognitive neuroscience research on the brain mechanisms underlying spatial attention shifts, as well as a chapter summarizing recent research on crossmodal attention shifts, and elucidating the links between attention orienting in the visual, auditory, and tactile domains. In the Epilogue they offer a concise summary of the book, and develop preliminary frameworks for understanding the relationship between spatial attention and orienting in response to social cues (social cognitive neuroscience) and for describing the evolution of covert orienting. Orienting of Attention provides a systematic survey that is ideal for those looking for an accessible introduction to the field and also for students and researchers who want a state-of the-art overview.

This volume creates a bridge across cognitive development and cognitive aging. Pairs of researchers study the rise and fall of specific cognitive functions, such as attention, executive functioning, memory, working memory, representations, language, problem solving, intelligence, and individual differences to find ways in which the study of development and decline converge on common processes and mechanisms. The contributed chapters are framed by an introduction that sets out the problems to be discussed and a conclusion that extracts the common themes and speculates on the implications for theory building. The book is unique in offering a lifespan approach to cognition by experts in the individual facts of cognitive functioning from either the developmental or the aging perspective.

This book follows a successful symposium organized in June 2009 at the Human Brain Mapping conference. The topic is at the crossroads of two domains of increasing importance and appeal in the neuroimaging/neuroscience community: multi-modal integration, and social neuroscience. Most of our social interactions involve combining information from both the face and voice of other persons: speech information, but also crucial nonverbal information on the person's identity and affective state. The cerebral bases of the multimodal integration of speech have been intensively investigated; by contrast only few studies have focused on nonverbal aspects of face-voice integration. This work highlights recent advances in investigations of the behavioral and cerebral bases of face-voice multimodal integration in the context of person perception, focusing on the integration of affective and identity information. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective. Several research domains are brought together. Behavioral and neuroimaging work in normal adult humans included are presented alongside evidence from other domains to provide complementary perspectives: studies in human children for a developmental perspective, studies in non-human primates for an evolutionary perspective, and studies in human clinical populations for a clinical perspective.

From the inventor of the PalmPilot comes a new and compelling theory of intelligence, brain function, and the future of intelligent machines
Jeff Hawkins, the man who created the PalmPilot, Treo smart phone, and other handheld devices, has reshaped our relationship to computers. Now he stands ready to revolutionize both neuroscience and computing in one stroke, with a new understanding of intelligence itself.
Hawkins develops a powerful theory of how the human brain works, explaining why computers are not intelligent and how, based on this new theory, we can finally build intelligent machines.
The brain is not a computer, but a memory system that stores experiences in a way that reflects the true structure of the world, remembering sequences of events and their nested relationships and making predictions based on those memories. It is this memory-prediction system that forms the basis of intelligence, perception, creativity, and even consciousness.
In an engaging style that will captivate audiences from the merely curious to the professional scientist, Hawkins shows how a clear understanding of how the brain works will make it possible for us to build intelligent machines, in silicon, that will exceed our human ability in surprising ways.
Written with acclaimed science writer Sandra Blakeslee, "On Intelligence" promises to completely transfigure the possibilities of the technology age. It is a landmark book in its scope and clarity.

Our understanding of the nature and processing of figurative language is central to several important issues in cognitive science, including the relationship of language and thought, how we process language, and how we comprehend abstract meaning. Over the past fifteen years, traditional approaches to these issues have been challenged by experimental psychologists, linguists, and other cognitive scientists interested in the structures of the mind and the processes that operate on them. In Figurative Language and Thought, internationally recognized experts in the field of figurative language, Albert Katz, Mark Turner, Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., and Cristina Cacciari, provide a coherent and focused debate on the subject. The book's authors discuss a variety of fundamental questions, including: What can figures of speech tell us about the structure of the conceptual system? If and how should we distinguish the literal from the nonliteral in our theories of language and thought? Are we primarily figurative thinkers and consequently figurative language users or the other way around? Why do we prefer to speak metaphorically in everyday conversation, when literal options may be available for use? Is metaphor the only vehicle through which we can understand abstract concepts? What role do cultural and social factors play in our comprehension of figurative language? These and related questions are raised and argued in an integrative look at the role of nonliteral language in cognition. This volume, a part of Counterpoints series, will be thought-provoking reading for a wide range of cognitive psychologists, linguists, and philosophers.

A more nuanced perspective on cognition, behavior, personality, and pathology. Mind/brain. It is explained that mental activity is not possible without concepts/memory structures that exist in the brain and result from perceptual learning. Core mental activities including thinking, reasoning, and judgment are described as components of self-regulation and in terms of interacting neural systems. This framework also leads to a more specific and less stigmatizing system for classifying and diagnosing mental illnesses. This concise volume: Introduces the S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) model of mental activity. Recasts mental processes as neuro-mental processes. Provides empirical evidence for the neural basis for judgments. Addresses ongoing mind/brain questions such as whether thinking is unconscious. Key Insights into Basic of Mental Activity will interest scientists doing research in psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, human biology/anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Professors, lecturers, and instructors will find it important as a class text in these fields. And the book's clinical implications make it useful to practitioners of psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

'By the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin' Daniel Gilbert, author of the bestseller Stumbling on Happiness

'Fascinating . . . a thought-provoking journey into emotion science' The Wall Street Journal

'This meticulous, well-researched, and deeply thought out book provides information about our emotions - what they are, where they come from, why we have them. For anyone who has struggled to reconcile brain and heart, this book will be a treasure; it explains the science without short-changing the humanism of its topic' Andrew Solomon, bestselling author of Far From the Tree and The Noonday Demon

When you feel anxious, angry, happy, or surprised, what's really going on inside of you?

Many scientists believe that emotions come from a specific part of the brain, triggered by the world around us. The thrill of seeing an old friend, the fear of losing someone we love - each of these sensations seems to arise automatically and uncontrollably from within us, finding expression on our faces and in our behaviour, carrying us away with the experience.

This understanding of emotion has been around since Plato. But what if it is wrong? In How Emotions Are Made, pioneering psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett draws on the latest scientific evidence to reveal that our common-sense ideas about emotions are dramatically, even dangerously, out of date - and that we have been paying the price. Emotions aren't universally pre-programmed in our brains and bodies; rather they are psychological experiences that each of us constructs based on our unique personal history, physiology and environment.

This new view of emotions has serious implications: when judges issue lesser sentences for crimes of passion, when police officers fire at threatening suspects, or when doctors choose between one diagnosis and another, they're all, in some way, relying on the ancient assumption that emotions are hardwired into our brains and bodies. Revising that conception of emotion isn't just good science, Barrett shows; it's vital to our well-being and the health of society itself.

This book employs a new eco-cognitive model of abduction to underline the distributed and embodied nature of scientific cognition. Its main focus is on the knowledge-enhancing virtues of abduction and on the productive role of scientific models. What are the distinctive features that define the kind of knowledge produced by science? To provide an answer to this question, the book first addresses the ideas of Aristotle, who stressed the essential inferential and distributed role of external cognitive tools and epistemic mediators in abductive cognition. This is analyzed in depth from both a naturalized logic and an ecology of cognition perspective. It is shown how the maximization of cognition, and of abducibility - two typical goals of science - are related to a number of fundamental aspects: the optimization of the eco-cognitive situatedness; the maximization of changeability for both the input and the output of the inferences involved; a high degree of information-sensitiveness; and the need to record the "past life" of abductive inferential practices. Lastly, the book explains how some impoverished epistemological niches - the result of a growing epistemic irresponsibility associated with the commodification and commercialization of science - are now seriously jeopardizing the flourishing development of human creative abduction.

Human cognition increasingly is coming to be understood and studied as something that does not necessarily reside within individuals, but rather as something that evolves through interpersonal communication. Using the interpersonal event as the unit of analysis, the authors of "Collaborative Cognition" examine how children interactively co-construct knowledge and ways of knowing in social contexts. In an illustration of the idea that thinking is as much interactive as self-reflective--one that supports the cognitive developmental theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky--this important new study examines the social origins of thought, and the inherently discursive nature of thinking itself.

The social context in question was created by the authors, who showed to pairs of children a variety of game materials and asked them to collaborate on creating a board game. Negotiating the co-construction of a game, back and forth, turn by turn, enabled the children to construct jointly a series of mutually obligatory goals and rules that sequentially defined the evolution of increasingly more complex modes of play. This innovative use of sequential analyses to study evolving streams of conversation discourse represents a fully process-oriented, rather than outcome-oriented, approach to studying cognitive development.

This book explores an eminently human phenomenon: our capacity to engage with the possible, to go beyond what is present, visible, or given in our existence. Possibility studies is an emerging field of research including topics as diverse as creativity, imagination, innovation, anticipation, counterfactual thinking, wondering, the future, social change, hope, agency, and utopia. The Possible: A Sociocultural Theory contributes to this wide field by developing a sociocultural account of the possible grounded in the notions of difference, position, perspective, dialogue, action, and culture. This theory aims to offer conceptual, methodological, and practical tools for all those interested in studying human possibility and cultivating it in education, at the workplace, in everyday life, and in society.

From the Preface: Blending ideas from operations research, music psychology, music theory, and cognitive science, this book aims to tell a coherent story of how tonality pervades our experience, and hence our models, of music. The story is told through the developmental stages of the Spiral Array model for tonality, a geometric model designed to incorporate and represent principles of tonal cognition, thereby lending itself to practical applications of tonal recognition, segmentation, and visualization. Mathematically speaking, the coils that make up the Spiral Array model are in effect helices, a spiral referring to a curve emanating from a central point. The use of "spiral" here is inspired by spiral staircases, intertwined spiral staircases: nested double helices within an outer spiral. The book serves as a compilation of knowledge about the Spiral Array model and its applications, and is written for a broad audience, ranging from the layperson interested in music, mathematics, and computing to the music scientist-engineer interested in computational approaches to music representation and analysis, from the music-mathematical and computational sciences student interested in learning about tonality from a formal modeling standpoint to the computer musician interested in applying these technologies in interactive composition and performance. Some chapters assume no musical or technical knowledge, and some are more musically or computationally involved.