Research on natural and artificial brains is proceeding at a rapid pace. However, the understanding of the essence of consciousness has changed slightly over the millennia, and only the last decade has brought some progress to the area. Scientific ideas emerged that the soul could be a product of the material body and that calculating machines could imitate brain processes. However, the authors of this book reject the previously common dualism-the view that the material and spiritual-psychic processes are separate and require a completely different substance as their foundation. Reductive Model of the Conscious Mind is a forward-thinking book wherein the authors identify processes that are the essence of conscious thinking and place them in the imagined, simplified structure of cells able to memorize and transmit information in the form of impulses, which they call neurons. The purpose of the study is to explain the essence of consciousness to the degree of development of natural sciences, because only the latter can find a way to embed the concept of the conscious mind in material brains. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 works to convince readers that the emergence of consciousness does not require detailed knowledge of the structure and morphology of the brain, with the exception of some specific properties of the neural network structure that the authors attempt to point out. Part 2 proves that the biological structure of many natural brains fulfills the necessary conditions for consciousness and intelligent thinking. Similarly, Part 3 shows the ways in which artificial creatures imitating natural brains can meet these conditions, which gives great hopes for building artificially intelligent beings endowed with consciousness. Covering topics that include cognitive architecture, the embodied mind, and machine learning, this book is ideal for cognitive scientists, philosophers of mind, neuroscientists, psychologists, researchers, academicians, and advanced-level students. The book can also help to focus the research of linguists, neurologists, and biophysicists on the biophysical basis of postulated information processing into knowledge structures.

'GeniusX: Business Intelligence' presents established guidelines to help you understand your inner self as well as those around you across a variety of situations. Positive thinking, critical decision-making, personnel selection, ways of life and customised methods for business operations are presented via the concept of people categorisations of which Cognitive Neuroscience lists six types; Game Changes, Entrepreneurs, Networkers, Informationists, Uniques and Sharers. We are able to learn about people if we can unlock the diverse decision-making processes that take place in their brains. Once we understand the inner workings, we can rectify problems and deal with all types of people and situations. Knowing the unique working styles of individuals allows you to build success at work, and enjoyment in your personal life at your own pace.

While cognitive informatics and natural intelligence are receiving greater attention by researchers, multidisciplinary approaches still struggle with fundamental problems involving psychology and neurobiological processes of the brain. Examining the difficulties of certain approaches using the tools already available is vital for propelling knowledge forward and making further strides. Innovations, Algorithms, and Applications in Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence is a collection of innovative research that examines the enhancement of human cognitive performance using emerging technologies. Featuring research on topics such as parallel computing, neuroscience, and signal processing, this book is ideally designed for engineers, computer scientists, programmers, academicians, researchers, and students.

Santandreu has written four books which have sold more than 1 million copies in Spain alone. His books have been translated into 16 languages.

Scientific knowledge is the most solid and robust kind of knowledge that humans have because of the self-correcting character inherent in its own processes. Nevertheless, anti-evolutionists, climate denialists, and anti-vaxxers, among others, question some of the best-established scientific findings, making claims that are unsupported by empirical evidence. A common aspect of these claims is the reference to the uncertainties in these areas of research, which leads to the conclusion that science is uncertain about evolution, climate change, and vaccination, among others. The truth of the matter is that while the broad picture is clear, there exist-and will always exist-uncertainties about the details of the respective phenomena. In this book Kampourakis and McCain show that uncertainty is an inherent feature of science that does not devalue it. In contrast, uncertainty actually makes science advance because it motivates further research. The first book of its kind, Uncertainty draws on philosophy of science to explain what uncertainty in science is and how it makes science advance. It contrasts evolution, climate change, and vaccination, where the uncertainties are exaggerated, to genetic testing and forensic science where the uncertainties are usually overlooked. Kampourakis and McCain discuss the scientific, psychological, and philosophical aspects of uncertainty in order to explain what it is really about, what kind of problems it actually poses, and why it ultimately makes science advance. Contrary to the public representations of scientific findings and conclusions that produce an intuitive but distorted view of science as certain, we need to understand and learn to live with uncertainty in science.

Developmental psychologists coined the term "theory of mind" to describe how we understand our shifting mental states in daily life. Over the past twenty years researchers have provided rich, provocative data showing that from an early age, children develop a sophisticated and consistent "theory of mind" by attributing their desires, beliefs, and emotions to themselves and to others. Remarkably, infants barely a few months old are able to attend closely to other humans; two-year-olds can articulate the desires and feelings of others and comfort those in distress; and three- and four-year-olds can talk about thoughts abstractly and engage in lies and trickery.
This book provides a deeper examination of how "theory of mind" develops. Building on his pioneering research in The Child's Theory of Mind (1990), Henry M. Wellman reports on all that we have learned in the past twenty years with chapters on evolution and the brain bases of theory of mind, and updated explanations of theory theory and later theoretical developments, including how children conceive of extraordinary minds such as those belonging to superheroes or supernatural beings. Engaging and accessibly written, Wellman's work will appeal especially to scholars and students working in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and social cognition.

Human beings are competitive. We want to know who is the strongest, who is the richest, and who is the cleverest of all. Some situations, like ranking people based on height, can be ranked in objective ways. However, many "Top Ten" lists are based on subjective categorization and give only the illusion of objectivity. In fact, we don't always want to be seen objectively since we don't mind having a better image or rank than deserved. Ranking: The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play applies scientific theories to everyday experience by raising and answering questions like: Are college ranking lists objective? How do we rank and rate countries based on their fragility, level of corruption, or even happiness? How do we find the most relevant web pages? How are employees ranked? This book is for people who have a neighbor with a fancier car; employees, who are being ranked by their supervisors; managers, who are involved in ranking but may have qualms about the process; businesspeople interested in creating better visibility for their companies; scientists, writers, artists, and other competitors who would like to see themselves at the top of a success list; or college students who are just preparing to enter a new phase of social competition. Readers will engage in an intellectual adventure to better understand the difficulties of navigating between objectivity and subjectivity and to better identify and modify their place in real and virtual communities by combining human and computational intelligence. Translation editions available in German, Korean, Japanese, Complex Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.

The term 'Implicit Learning' refers to the way in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material can be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what has been learned. Over the past fifty years, Implict Learning has became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. In The Cognitive Unconscious, Arthur S. Reber and Rhianon Allen bring together several dozen experts from social science and neuroscience to present a broad overview of the exploration of the cognitive unconscious. Each chapter delves deeper into a subject that has become an interdisciplinary domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, linguists, social and organizational psychologists, and sport psychologists, amongst many others. The book shows that unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. As the contributors demonstrate, the implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. With contributions from over thirty distinguished authors from nine different countries, The Cognitive Unconscious gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, over a half-century since the first experiments were run.

Neuroscience, the study of the structure and function of the brain, has captured our imaginations. Breakthrough technologies permit neuroscientists to probe how the human brain works in ever-more fascinating detail, revealing what happens when we think, move, love, hate, and fear. We know more than ever before about what goes wrong in the brain when we develop psychiatric and neurological illnesses like depression, dementia, epilepsy, panic attacks, and schizophrenia. We also now have clues about how treatments for those disorders change the way our brains look and function. Neuroscience at the Intersection of Mind and Brain has three main purposes. First, it makes complicated concepts and findings in modern neuroscience accessible to anyone with an interest in how the brain works. Second, it explains in detail how every experience we have from the moment we are conceived changes our brains. Third, it advances the idea that psychotherapy is a type of life experience that alters brain function and corrects aberrant brain connections. Among the topics covered are: what makes our brains different from those of other primates, our nearest genetic neighbors? How do life's experiences affect genetic expression of the brain and the way neurons connect with each other? Why are connections between different parts of the brain important in both health and disease? What happens in the brains of animals and humans when we are suddenly afraid of something, get depressed, or fall in love? How do medications and psychotherapies work? The information in this book is based on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology. Written by an author who studied human behavior and brain function for three decades, it is presented in a highly accessible manner, full of personal anecdotes and observations, and touches on many of the controversies in contemporary mental health practice.

Cogito, ergo sum. (""I think, therefore I am."") When Descartes quipped this, he erroneously split thinking from feeling. He assumed thoughts emerge from a substance other than feeling. This is a historic tragedy, and it is unnecessary. It brings us to a risky end-game. When we attempt to meld preconceived thought with evoked feelings, we come to the craft of ""spin doctors."" Instead, there is a natural path for connecting thinking and feeling. It involves emotional reflection at the time that understandings are created. This book draws attention to a form of dialogue which is called design dialogue. Design dialogue constructs new meaning from the bottom up. Individuals construct new meanings through individual thinking. In design dialogue, meaning results from group thinking. Group thinking is not as simple as thinking individually while being present within a group. The design process results in a series of co-constructed learning artifacts which, ultimately, constitute a new understanding. The process is concurrently emotional and cognitive, and melding emotion and cognition is achievable with effective design dialogue methods. The first chapter introduces emotion as the catalyst for considering questions, persisting in reflection, and concluding a cycle of thought. This chapter fills in gaps with the treatment of emotion and cognition. The second chapter lays out the sequence of observation-taking, sensemaking, meaning-making, and perspective-taking that are essential steps in thinking. Frameworks for thinking in educational traditions focus not so much on the neurological mechanics of the thought process but rather on the overall internalization of a ""way"" of understanding things. A third chapter presents a methodology for managing a design dialogue. Group facilitators generally invent and modify their own approaches for leading design projects. This chapter presents a codified approach that offers an advantage of supporting continuous improvement of complex design management methodology. And the final chapter considers the emergence of a sapient group-mind through the agency of design dialogue. This conjectured group-mind is considered in the context of the civic infrastructure that is needed to sustain the continual growth of the human superorganism structure. As humanity has moved from tribes, to cities, to institutions, and now to globally connected networks, each leap forward has been accompanied by profound changes in social practices and belief systems. Recent findings from the field of cognitive science have confirmed a suspicion that we have long held about each other. Individual thinking is biased and flawed. Inclusive and democratically managed discussion, deliberation and design all help to identify and dampen flawed understandings. The individual mind, an essential ingredient in the human spirit, is now, as a matter of practical necessity, bending to the wisdom of a well-informed group mind. The speed and strength of newly emerging social forces and evolving civic trends point to the conclusion that we are on the threshold for a new way of being. This book seeks to evoke reflection on how we can start communicating in a way that prepares us for life in that new future.

As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as watches, gauges, compasses, airplane cockpit displays, with structure specifically designed to match conceptual inputs and integrate with them into stable blended frames of perception and action that can be memorized, learned by new generations, and thus culturally transmitted.

How developments in science and technology may enable the emergence of purely digital minds-intelligent machines equal to or greater in power than the human brain. What do computers, cells, and brains have in common? Computers are electronic devices designed by humans; cells are biological entities crafted by evolution; brains are the containers and creators of our minds. But all are, in one way or another, information-processing devices. The power of the human brain is, so far, unequaled by any existing machine or known living being. Over eons of evolution, the brain has enabled us to develop tools and technology to make our lives easier. Our brains have even allowed us to develop computers that are almost as powerful as the human brain itself. In this book, Arlindo Oliveira describes how advances in science and technology could enable us to create digital minds. Exponential growth is a pattern built deep into the scheme of life, but technological change now promises to outstrip even evolutionary change. Oliveira describes technological and scientific advances that range from the discovery of laws that control the behavior of the electromagnetic fields to the development of computers. He calls natural selection the ultimate algorithm, discusses genetics and the evolution of the central nervous system, and describes the role that computer imaging has played in understanding and modeling the brain. Having considered the behavior of the unique system that creates a mind, he turns to an unavoidable question: Is the human brain the only system that can host a mind? If digital minds come into existence-and, Oliveira says, it is difficult to argue that they will not-what are the social, legal, and ethical implications? Will digital minds be our partners, or our rivals?

How to assess critical aspects of cognitive functioning that are not measured by IQ tests: rational thinking skills. Why are we surprised when smart people act foolishly? Smart people do foolish things all the time. Misjudgments and bad decisions by highly educated bankers and money managers, for example, brought us the financial crisis of 2008. Smart people do foolish things because intelligence is not the same as the capacity for rational thinking. The Rationality Quotient explains that these two traits, often (and incorrectly) thought of as one, refer to different cognitive functions. The standard IQ test, the authors argue, doesn't measure any of the broad components of rationality-adaptive responding, good judgment, and good decision making. The authors show that rational thinking, like intelligence, is a measurable cognitive competence. Drawing on theoretical work and empirical research from the last two decades, they present the first prototype for an assessment of rational thinking analogous to the IQ test: the CART (Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking). The authors describe the theoretical underpinnings of the CART, distinguishing the algorithmic mind from the reflective mind. They discuss the logic of the tasks used to measure cognitive biases, and they develop a unique typology of thinking errors. The Rationality Quotient explains the components of rational thought assessed by the CART, including probabilistic and scientific reasoning; the avoidance of "miserly" information processing; and the knowledge structures needed for rational thinking. Finally, the authors discuss studies of the CART and the social and practical implications of such a test. An appendix offers sample items from the test.

This book presents interdisciplinary research on cognition, mind and behavior from an information processing perspective. It includes chapters on Artificial Intelligence, Decision Support Systems, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Support Vector Machines, chiefly with regard to the data obtained and analyzed in Medical Informatics, Bioinformatics and related disciplines. The book reflects the state-of-the-art in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, and covers theory, algorithms, numerical simulation, error and uncertainty analysis, as well novel applications of new processing techniques in Biomedical Informatics, Computer Science and its applied areas. As such, it offers a valuable resource for students and researchers from the fields of Computer Science and Engineering in Medicine and Biology.