The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity. The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'. The book draws in particular on the work of Bolte Taylor, whose study in this area is having a profound impact on how we understand mental activity and processes.

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century. This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts promote insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Adhering to an instructive narrative, Affective Societies provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook at the end of each chapter. Presenting interdisciplinary research from scholars within the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies," this insightful monograph will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as affect and emotion, anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies.

Many parts of the athlete's body are important for performance, such as strong muscles and bones; healthy lungs and heart; and several sensory systems, including the vision, touch, and joint position senses, and the vestibular system for balance. However, the critical element for athletic performance is, "not what you have but how you use it." The organ that decides "how you use it" is the brain. This book explains how the brain allows the athlete to perform. The book starts with an outline of brain anatomy, which is necessary to understand how the brain functions. The book then outlines many critical aspects of the athlete's brain, including learning motor skills; decision-making; hand preference; visual perception of speed, distance, and direction; balance; emotions and mood. Finally, the book discusses the adverse influence of brain injuries.

Originally published in 1982. This book is concerned with the new kinds of demands on our reading ability made by the work we undertake for A-level, or in college, or at university, or indeed at work. It is not a speed reading book, or a reading skills book. Anyone with a lot of reading to get through may not want to read all of it quickly. Some things can be skimmed through; others take a lot of reading. This book helps readers discriminate and gives techniques to assume responsibility for their own reading. The book takes the form of a reading workbook, and consists of a number of exercises together with an interleaving commentary, along with suggestions for further work. It can be used by the individual student, by students in groups or with a teacher, and as a sourcebook for courses in study skills.

Originally published in 1992. This book brings together the work of a number of distinguished international researchers engaged in basic research on beginning reading. Individual chapters address various processes and problems in learning to read - including how acquisition gets underway, the contribution of story listening experiences, what is involved in learning to read words, and how readers represent information about written words in memory. In addition, the chapter contributors consider how phonological, onset-rime, and syntactic awareness contribute to reading acquisition, how learning to spell is involved, how reading ability can be explained as a combination of decoding skill plus listening comprehension skill, and what causes reading difficulties and how to study these causes.

This volume addresses key questions related to how content in thought is derived from perceptual experience. It includes chapters that focus on single issues on perception and cognition, as well as others that relate these issues to an important social construct that involves both perceptual experience and cognitive activities: aesthetics. While the volume includes many diverse views, several prominent themes unite the individual essays: a challenge to the notion of the discreet, and non-temporal, unit of perception, a challenge to the traditional divide between perception and cognition, and a challenge to the traditional divide between unconscious and conscious intentionality. Additionally, the chapters discuss the content of perceptual experience, the value of traditional notions of content, disjunctivism, adverbialism, and phenomenal experience. The final section of essays dealing with perception and cognition in aesthetics features work in experimental aesthetics and unique perspectives from artists and gallerists working outside of philosophy. Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics is a timely volume that offers a range of unique perspectives on debates in philosophy of mind surrounding perception and cognition. It will also appeal to scholars working in aesthetics and art theory who are interested in the ways these debates influence our understanding of art.

A book that fundamentally changes how neuroscientists and psychologists categorize sensations and understand the origins and significance of human feelings How Do You Feel? brings together startling evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry to present revolutionary new insights into how our brains enable us to experience the range of sensations and mental states known as feelings. Drawing on his own cutting-edge research, neurobiologist Bud Craig has identified an area deep inside the mammalian brain-the insular cortex-as the place where interoception, or the processing of bodily stimuli, generates feelings. He shows how this crucial pathway for interoceptive awareness gives rise in humans to the feeling of being alive, vivid perceptual feelings, and a subjective image of the sentient self across time. Craig explains how feelings represent activity patterns in our brains that signify emotions, intentions, and thoughts, and how integration of these patterns is driven by the unique energy needs of the hominid brain. He describes the essential role of feelings and the insular cortex in such diverse realms as music, fluid intelligence, and bivalent emotions, and relates these ideas to the philosophy of William James and even to feelings in dogs. How Do You Feel? is also a compelling insider's account of scientific discovery, one that takes readers behind the scenes as the astonishing answer to this neurological puzzle is pursued and pieced together from seemingly unrelated fields of scientific inquiry. This book will fundamentally alter the way that neuroscientists and psychologists categorize sensations and understand the origins and significance of human feelings.

The study of deductive reasoning is one of the key areas in cognitive psychology. Much of the initial impetus for studies in this field came from a developmental perspective, in particular as a consequence of Piaget's theory of formal operations. Subsequent research that examined some of the predictions of this theory has led to what appear to be quite contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, reasoning is held to be a very precociously acquired, if not innate, competence, such that very young children can reason 'logically'. On the other hand, reasoning in adults has been found to be so convincingly 'illogical' that the very notion of logical competence, even in educated adults has been put into question. Clearly, these two conclusions cannot both be true, and their continuing existence reflects the increasing fragmentation of studies of children and of adults. In this context, developmental studies appear to be critical to an integrative approach to reasoning that considers both children and adults within a single theoretical and empirical perspective. This issue presents some of the more important developmental perspectives on the development of reasoning.

The research literature on causal attribution and social cognition generally consists of many fascinating but fragmented and superficial phenomena. These can only be understood as an organised whole by elucidating the fundamental psychological assumptions on which they depend. Originally published in 1993, Psychological Metaphysics is an exploration of the most basic and important assumptions in the psychological construction of reality, with the aim of showing what they are, how they originate, and what they are there for. Peter A. White proposes that people basically understand causation in terms of stable, specific powers of things operating to produce effects under suitable conditions. This underpins an analysis of people's understanding of causal processes in the physical word and of human action, which makes a radical break with the Heiderian tradition. Psychological Metaphysics suggests that causal attribution is in the service of the person's practical concerns and any interest in accuracy or understanding is subservient to this. A notion of regularity in the world is of no more than minor importance in causal attribution, and social cognition is not so much a matter of cognitive mechanisms or processes but more of cultural ways of thinking imposed upon tacit, unquestioned, universal assumptions. Psychological Metaphysics incorporates not only research and theory in social cognition and developmental psychology, but also philosophy and the history of ideas. It will be challenging to everyone interested in how we try to understand the world.

In recent years, research in the social sciences and cultural studies has increasingly paid attention to the generative power of emotions and affects; that is, to the questions of how far they shape social and cultural processes while being simultaneously shaped by them. However, the literature on the methodological implications of researching affects and emotions remains rather limited. As a collective outcome of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) Affective Societies at Freie Universitat Berlin, Analyzing Affective Societies introduces procedures and methodologies applied by researchers of the CRC for investigating societies as affective societies. Presenting scholarly research practices by means of concrete examples and case studies, the book does not contain any conclusive methodological advice, but rather engages in illustrative descriptions of the authors' research practices. Analyzing Affective Societies unveils different research approaches, procedures and practices of a variety of disciplines from the humanities, arts and social sciences. It will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Qualitative Research Methods, Emotions, Affect, Cultural Studies and Social Sciences.

Solution focused brief therapy is an evidence-based approach that enables people to make meaningful change in their everyday lives. This book shares ideas on how speech and language therapists and others working in medical settings can integrate SFBT into their therapeutic interactions to support clients handling acute or chronic health conditions. It outlines core aspects of the approach in an accessible format, bridging the gap between theory and practice, and provides guidance on adapting SFBT for clients living with communication disabilities. There are suggestions for different clinical situations, with real-life case examples drawn from working with people living with Parkinson's disease, stroke, motor neurone disease, cancer and chronic pain. Combining practical advice with photocopiable resources, this book covers: Establishing person-centred, holistic goals for therapy Future focused descriptions Building on a person's resources and successes Responding to distress Supervision and support This accessible book can be read as an introductory text for those new to this approach and will also be invaluable to clinicians who have already received some training in SFBT. It is likely to become a trusted resource, supporting allied health professionals and others to ensure their therapy is grounded in client priorities.

This book reconceives virtue epistemology in light of the conviction that we are essentially social creatures. Virtue is normally thought of as something that allows individuals to accomplish things on their own. Although contemporary ethics is increasingly making room for an inherently social dimension in moral agency, intellectual virtues continue to be seen in terms of the computing potential of a brain taken by itself. Thinking in these terms, however, seriously misconstrues the way in which our individual flourishing hinges on our collective flourishing. Green's account of virtue epistemology is based on the extended credit view, which conceives of knowledge as an achievement and broadens that focus to include team achievements in addition to individual ones. He argues that this view does a better job than alternatives of answering the many conceptual and empirical challenges for virtue epistemology that have been based on cases of testimony. The view also allows for a nuanced interaction with situationist psychology, dual processing models in cognitive science, and the extended mind literature in philosophy of mind. This framework provides a useful conceptual bridge between individual and group epistemology, and it has novel applications to the epistemology of disagreement, prejudice, and authority.

Applying the Constructivist Approach to Cognitive Therapy goes beyond the traditional objectivist approach of uncovering the what of a client's dysfunctional thinking by helping client and therapist understand why the client thinks in a dysfunctional manner. This unique work demonstrates how this thinking can be uncovered through dreamwork, analytic hypnotherapy, ecstatic trance, and other spontaneous trance experiences such as the use of imagination, free association, and guided imagery. Utilizing hypnotherapeutic techniques, the author shows how clients can reframe these thoughts to achieve a healthier, more functional way of thinking. Replete with case studies and practical guidance, this text will help therapists take clients beyond a simple resolution of their problems and offer an avenue to greater personal growth, maturity, and creativity.

At the heart of creativity is the practice of bringing something new into existence, whether it be a material object or abstract idea, thereby making history and enriching the creative tradition. A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity explores the idea that creativity is both a cognitive phenomenon and a historical process. Blending insights and theories of cognitive science with the skills, mentality and investigative tools of the historian, this book considers diverse issues including: the role of the unconscious in creativity, the creative process, creating history with a new object or idea, and the relationship between creators and consumers. Drawing on a plethora of real-life examples from the eighteenth century through to the present day, and from distinct fields including the arts, literature, science and engineering, Subrata Dasgupta emphasizes historicity as a fundamental feature of creativity. Providing a unified, integrative, interdisciplinary treatment of cognitive history and its application to understanding and explaining creativity in its multiple domains, A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity is essential reading for all researchers of creativity.

How can computers recognize faces? Why are caricatures of famous faces so easily recognized? Originally published in 1995, much of the previous research on face recognition had been phenomena driven. Recent empirical work together with the application of computational, mathematical and statistical techniques have provided new ways of conceptualizing the information available in faces. These advances have led researchers to suggest that many phenomena can be explained by the structure of the information available in the population(s) of faces. This broad approach has drawn together a number of apparently disparate phenomena with a common theoretical basis, including cross-race recognition; the distinctiveness of faces; the production and recognition of caricatures; and the determinants of facial attractiveness. This title provides a state of the art review of the field at the time in which the authors use a wide variety of approaches. What is common to all is that the authors base the accounts of the phenomena they study or their model of face recognition on the statistics of the information available in the population of faces. On publication this title was a comprehensive, up-to-date review of an important area of research in face recognition written by active researchers. It includes contributions from mathematics, computer science and neural network theory as well as psychology. It is aimed at research workers and postgraduate students and will be of interest to cognitive psychologists and computer scientists interested in face recognition. It will also be of interest to those working on neural network models of visual recognition, perceptual development, expertise in visual cognition as well as facial attractiveness and caricature.

This volume is comprised of contributions to the 67th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, which brought together various research disciplines such as psychology, education, health sciences, natural resources, environmental studies to investigate the ways in which nature influences cognition, health, human behavior, and well-being. The symposium is positioned to explore two proposed mechanisms in the most depth: 1) the psycho-evolutionary theory of stress recovery and 2) Attention Restoration Theory. The contributions in the volume represent research guided by both of these posited mechanisms, rigorously examine these theories and processes, and share methodological innovations that can be utilized across programs of research. This volume will be of great interest to researchers on natural environments, practitioners and clinicians working with an environmental lens at the intersection of psychology, social work, education and the health sciences, as well as researchers and students in environmental and conservation psychology. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

In the World Library of Psychologists series, international experts themselves present career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, and their major practical theoretical contributions. Kenneth Gilhooly has an international reputation as an eminent scholar and pioneer in the field of thinking and reasoning. The book covers key works on problem solving, expertise, working memory and thinking, and ageing. A specially written introduction gives an overview of his career and contextualises the selection in relation to changes in the field during this time. The book enables the reader to trace developments in thinking and reasoning over the last forty years.It will be essential reading students and researchers of cognitive psychology interested in the history of thinking and reasoning.

What is intelligence? How can we examine individual differences in intelligence? What does it mean to be very intelligent or dumb? Such questions have always pervaded human thinking, and have been raised during the development of scientific psychology. However, for many years, the practical needs of having reliable measures of intelligence have prevailed and the field has suffered the limitations of the psychometric approach. Recently, cognitive neuroscience, and in particular cognitive psychology, have proposed new models and data which have revived thinking in this area. This Special Issue offers examples of how the field of cognitive psychology can contribute not only to the refinement of theoretical thinking but also to the development of new tools for the study of human intelligence. The contributors to the issue are prominent researchers in working memory, speed of processing, executive functions, language, and intellectual development/decline and show how their lines of research may contribute key concepts and methods to the field. Different ideas and lines of research within cognitive psychology are presented, but, working memory, despite some contra-indications discussed throughout the issue, emerges from many chapters as the most important contender for the study of central aspects of intelligence.

One particularly adaptive feature of human cognition is the ability to mentally preview specific events before they take place in reality. Familiar examples of this ability-often referred to as episodic future thinking-include what happens when an employee imagines when, where, and how they might go about asking their boss for a raise, or when a teenager anguishes over what might happen if they ask their secret crush on a date. In this book, the editors bring together current perspectives from researchers from around the globe who are working to develop a deeper understanding of the manner in which the simulations of future events are constructed, the role of emotion and personal meaning in the context of episodic simulation, and how the ability to imagine specific future events relates to other forms of future thinking such as the ability to remember to carry out intended actions in the future. This book was originally published as a special issue of The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

This book adopts a cognitive theoretical framework in order to address the mental processes that are elicited and triggered by found footage horror films. Through analysis of key films, the book explores the effects that the diegetic camera technique used in such films can have on the cognition of viewers. It further examines the way in which mediated realism is constructed in the films in order to attempt to make audiences either (mis)read the footage as non-fiction, or more commonly to imagine that the footage is non-fiction. Films studied include The Blair Witch Project, Rec, Paranormal Activity, Exhibit A, Cloverfield, Man Bites Dog, The Last Horror Movie, Noroi: The Curse, Autohead and Zero Day This book will be of key interest to Film Studies scholars with research interests in horror and genre studies, cognitive studies of the moving image, and those with interests in narration, realism and mimesis. It is an essential read for students undertaking courses with a focus on film theory, particularly those interested specifically in horror films and cognitive film theory.

Originally published in 1982, the editors felt that their field was clearly in need of explanatory accounts for many different areas. This volume presents statements of the status of research in several areas by scholars at the forefront of the discipline. It tries at the same time to juxtapose theoretical and experimental perspectives in order to display some of the major lines of tension in the field. Divided into 5 parts it covers: Theoretical Perspectives; Experimental Studies in Processing; Neuropsychological Studies in Processing; Studies in Development; followed by Commentary on some specific chapters.

The notion that certain mental or physical events can capture attention has been one of the most enduring topics in the study of attention owing to the importance of understanding how goal-directed and stimulus-driven processes interact in perception and cognition. Despite the clear theoretical and applied importance of attentional capture, a broad survey of this field suggests that the term "capture" means different things to different people. In some cases, it refers to covert shifts of spatial attention, in others involuntary saccades, and in still others general disruption of processing by irrelevant stimuli. The properties that elicit "capture" can also range from abruptly onset or moving lights, to discontinuities in textures, to unexpected tones, to emotionally valenced words or pictures, to directional signs and symbols. Attentional capture has been explored in both the spatial and temporal domains as well as the visual and auditory modalities. There are also a number of different theoretical perspectives on the mechanisms underlying "capture" (both functional and neurophysiological) and the level of cognitive control over capture. This special issue provides a sampling of the diversity of approaches, domains, and theoretical perspectives that currently exist in the study of attentional capture. Together, these contributions should help evaluate the degree to which attentional capture represents a unitary construct that reflects fundamental theoretical principles and mechanisms of the mind.

This volume reflects the pressure to develop useful models and methodologies to study executive behaviour - the ability to update information in working memory in order to control selective attention to formulate plans of action and to monitor their efficient execution. Many models are based on the concept of a single "central executive" that manges these functions; others propose a number of independent "working memory systems" that each serve one task or activity but not others.; This book is a collection of essays by active researchers who discuss their own work on the definition of "executive" or "controlled" behaviours, and on the relation of these behaviours to specific areas of the frontal cortex. The papers are particularly concerned with logical difficulties that arise in defining these functions that lead, in turn, to methodological difficulties in studying them. In particular, they discuss such problems as the low test-re-test reliability of tasks that have been used to define and explore "executive" behaviours, the limited validity of these tasks in predicting performance deficits, the poor localization of the changes observed with respect to underlying brain function, and the relation of performance on these tasks to individual difference in performance on measures of "global" or "general" intellectual ability such as Spearman's 1927 gf.; The authors discuss their own research on the relations between cognitive function and neuropsychology, on changes in executive competence in conditions such as closed head injuries or dementias that may diffusely affect the whole brain, and on changes in executive function in normal old age.