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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > States of consciousness > General
Cutting-edge sleep advice and a 10-day reset plan from a renowned functional medicine physician and co-founder of the popular sleep company Casper. If you are like most people, the odds are you aren't getting enough sleep. Thanks to shifts in our culture, we are in the midst of an epidemic of sleeplessness, and unfortunately, sleep deprivation has bigger consequences than one might think, ranging from irritability, brain fog, and weight gain to serious conditions like hormone dysregulation, heart disease, memory impairment, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease. Better Sleep, Better You offers a one-stop resource to help you reap the benefits of sleeping well every night. Unlike the dozens of blogs and listicles offering a "quick fix" for insomnia, Lipman and Parikh understand that there's no such thing as a one-sleep-fits-all solution. By clearly explaining the latest developments in sleep science and all the factors that affect your sleep – including when and how you eat and exercise, how you handle stress, how you nap, and how you engage with technology – Better Sleep, Better You helps you create a personalised sleep plan, including a ten-day reset that you can put into practice to work for your lifestyle and needs. Packed with fascinating science, engaging case studies, and easy-to-implement practical advice, this book provides everything you need to optimize your sleep, productivity, and happiness – for life.
In this book, Derk Pereboom explores how physicalism might best be formulated and defended against the best anti-physicalist arguments. Two responses to the knowledge and conceivability arguments are set out and developed. The first exploits the open possibility that introspective representations fail to represent mental properties as they are in themselves; specifically, that introspection represents phenomenal properties as having certain characteristic qualitative natures, which these properties might actually lack. The second response draws on the proposal that currently unknown fundamental intrinsic properties provide categorical bases for known physical properties and would also yield an account of consciousness. While there are non-physicalist versions of this position, some are amenable to physicalism. The book's third theme is a defense of a nonreductive account of physicalism. The type of nonreductivism endorsed departs from others in that it rejects all token identity claims for psychological and microphysical entities. The deepest relation between the mental and the microphysical is constitution, where this relation is not to be explicated by the notion of identity.
This book focuses on Free Church pastors in Germany and their perceptions of spirit possession and mental illness. To explore Free Church pastors' understanding of spirit possession and mental illness is critical in light of the overlap of symptoms. Misdiagnosis may result in a client receiving treatment that may not be appropriate. Interviews with Free Church pastors were conducted. The results were analysed and four themes were identified. Based on these interviews conclusions could be drawn which ultimately made it clear that the German free church pastors' theological training needs to be supplemented in the area of psychology and that the pastors are unable to cope in the area of "spirit possession or mental illness".
Consciousness is familiar to us first hand, yet difficult to understand. This book concerns six basic concepts of consciousness exercised in ordinary English. The first is the interpersonal meaning and requires at least two people involved in relation to one another. The second is a personal meaning, having to do with one's own perspective on the kind of person one is and the life one is leading. The third meaning has reference simply to one being occurrently aware of something or as though of something. The fourth narrows the preceding sense to one having direct occurrent awareness of happenings in one's own experiential stream. The fifth is the unitive meaning of consciousness and has reference to those portions of one's stream that one self-appropriates to make up one's conscious being. The last is the general-state meaning and picks out the general operating mode in which we most often function.
The Sower and the Seed explores the origins of consciousness from a mytho-psychological angle. The concept of immanence, a vast intelligence within the evolutionary process, provides the underlying philosophy of the book, presented as a creative-destructive spirit that manifests higher orders of complexity (such as life, intelligence, self-consciousness) and then dissolves them. The book explores the human psyche as immersed in nature and the realm of the Great Mother, showing how the themes of fertility and power, applicable to all life forms, saturate the history of humanity - most evidently in the period stretching from 40,000 years ago up to modern civilizations. The book examines in particular the transition to patriarchal religious consciousness, in which a violent separation from the world of nature took place.
The idea of a disjunctive theory of visual experiences first found expression in J.M. Hinton's pioneering 1973 book Experiences. In the first monograph in this exciting area since then, William Fish develops a comprehensive disjunctive theory, incorporating detailed accounts of the three core kinds of visual experience-perception, hallucination, and illusion-and an explanation of how perception and hallucination could be indiscriminable from one another without having anything in common. In the veridical case, Fish contends that the perception of a particular state of affairs involves the subject's being acquainted with that state of affairs, and that it is the subject's standing in this acquaintance relation that makes the experience possess a phenomenal character. Fish argues that when we hallucinate, we are having an experience that, while lacking phenomenal character, is mistakenly supposed by the subject to possess it. Fish then shows how this approach to visual experience is compatible with empirical research into the workings of the brain and concludes by extending this treatment to cover the many different types of illusion that we can be subject to.
Some mental events are conscious, some are unconscious. What is the difference between the two? Uriah Kriegel offers the following answer: whatever else they may represent, conscious mental states always represent themselves (whereas unconscious ones do not, at least not in the right way). The book develops this 'self-representational' approach to consciousness along several dimensions - including phenomenological, ontological, and scientific - and defends it from common and uncommon criticisms.
Barry Dainton presents a fascinating new account of the self, the
key to which is experiential or phenomenal continuity.
What is the nature of consciousness? How is consciousness related
to brain processes? This volume collects thirteen new papers on
these topics: twelve by leading and respected philosophers and one
by a leading color-vision scientist. All focus on consciousness in
the "phenomenal" sense: on what it's like to have an experience.
Near death experiences fascinate everyone, from theologians to sociologists and neuroscientists. This groundbreaking book introduces the phenomenon of NDEs, their personal impact and the dominant scientific explanations. Taking a strikingly original cross-cultural approach and incorporating new medical research, it combines new theories of mind and body with contemporary research into how the brain functions. Ornella Corazza analyses dualist models of mind and body, discussing the main features of NDEs as reported by many people who have experienced them. She studies the use of ketamine to reveal how characteristics of NDEs can be chemically induced without being close to death. This evidence challenges the conventional 'survivalist hypothesis', according to which the near death experience is a proof of the existence of an afterlife. This remarkable book concludes that we need to move towards a more integrated view of embodiment, in order to understand what human life is and also what it can be. Ornella Corazza is a NDE researcher at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In 2004-5 she was a Member of the 21st Century Centre of Excellence (COE) 'Program on the Construction of Death and Life Studies' at the University of Tokyo.
What if you could dream 24 hours a day, even while awake? According to innovative psychotherapist Arnold Mindell, Ph.D., we already do. The seeds of dreaming arise in every moment of the day, in body symptoms, problems, relationships, subtile feelings, interactions, random thoughts, and fantasies. We're getting countless little cues from the unconscious every minute. All are signs from the world of dreaming. And, according to Mindell, we can be in this state of lucid dreaming all day long. In Dreaming While Awake, Mindell shows how to become aware of these "flirts" from the dreamworld and how to interpret their message. The goal, he says, is to be wide awake and lucid 24 hours a day in the midst of this unending dreamfield of information. Practicing 24-hour lucid dreaming:
Dreaming is the mystical source of reality, says Mindell. "My goal is to make the Dreaming roots of reality so accessible, so visceral, that your conscious mind will give you back your right to dream."
Consciousness has long been regarded as the biggest stumbling block for the view that the mind is physical. This volume collects thirteen new papers on this problem by leading philosophers including Torin Alter, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, John Hawthorne, Frank Jackson, Janet Levin, Joseph Levine, Martine Nida-R melin, Laurence Nemirow, Knut Nordby, David Papineau, and Stephen White.
Each of us, right now, is having a unique conscious experience. Nothing is more basic to our lives as thinking beings and nothing, it seems, is better known to us. But the ever-expanding reach of natural science suggests that everything in our world is ultimately physical. The challenge of fitting consciousness into our modern scientific worldview, of taking the subjective feel of conscious experience and showing that it is just neural activity in the brain, is among the most intriguing explanatory problems of our times. In this book, Josh Weisberg presents the range of contemporary responses to the philosophical problem of consciousness. The basic philosophical tools of the trade are introduced, including thought experiments featuring Mary the color-deprived super scientist and fearsome philosophical zombies . The book then systematically considers the space of philosophical theories of consciousness. Dualist and other non-reductive accounts of consciousness hold that we must expand our basic physical ontology to include the intrinsic features of consciousness. Functionalist and identity theories, by contrast, hold that with the right philosophical stage-setting, we can fit consciousness into the standard scientific picture. And mysterians hold that any solution to the problem is beyond such small-minded creatures as us. Throughout the book, the complexity of current debates on consciousness is handled in a clear and concise way, providing the reader with a fine introductory guide to the rich philosophical terrain. The work makes an excellent entry point to one of the most exciting areas of study in philosophy and science today.
As Alice in Wonderland discovered, cave entrances, tunnels, spirals and mirrors can transport people to strange worlds where anything is possible. Portals investigates how we move beyond the conscious and physical world using our senses, into other realities of the spiritual and the divine. Portals looks at the techniques used to alter consciousness practised by shamans, monks and other religious specialists. These include the use of drugs, as well as drumming, chanting and meditation. The book provides a new, anthropologically-grounded perspective on the wide-ranging questions about the realities of human consciousness and mystical, spiritual and religious experience.
Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought (HOT) that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications.
Meditation techniques, including mindfulness, have become popular wellbeing practices and the scientific study of their effects has recently turned 50 years old. But how much do we know about them: what were they developed for and by whom? How similar or different are they, how effective can they be in changing our minds and biology, what are their social and ethical implications? The Oxford Handbook of Meditation is the most comprehensive volume published on meditation, written in accessible language by world-leading experts on the science and history of these techniques. It covers the development of meditation across the world and the varieties of its practices and experiences. It includes approaches from various disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and sociology and it explores its potential for therapeutic and social change, as well as unusual or negative effects. Edited by practitioner-researchers, this book is the ultimate guide for all interested in meditation, including teachers, clinicians, therapists, researchers, or anyone who would like to learn more about this topic.
What is creativity, and where does it come from? Creativity and Development explores the fascinating connections and tensions between creativity research and developmental psychology, two fields that have largely progressed independently of each other-until now. In this book, scholars influential in both fields explore the emergence of new ideas, and the development of the people and situations that bring them to fruition. The uniquely collaborative nature of Oxford's Counterpoints series allows them to engage in a dialogue, addressing the key issues and potential benefits of exploring the connections between creativity and development. Creativity and Development is based on the observation that both creativity and development are processes that occur in complex systems, in which later stages or changes emerge from the prior state of the system. In the 1970s and 1980s, creativity researchers shifted their focus from personality traits to cognitive and social processes, and the co-authors of this volume are some of the most influential figures in this shift. The central focus on system processes results in three related volume themes: how the outcomes of creativity and development emerge from dynamical processes, the interrelation between individual processes and social processes, and the role of mediating artefacts and domains in developmental and creative processes. The chapters touch on a wide range of important topics, with the authors drawing on their decades of research into creativity and development. Readers will learn about the creativity of children's play, the creative aspects of children's thinking, the creative processes of scientists, the role of education and teaching in creative development, and the role of multiple intelligences in both creativity and development. The final chapter is an important dialogue between the authors, who engage in a roundtable discussion and explore key questions facing contemporary researchers, such as: Does society suppress children's creativity? Are creativity and development specific to an intelligence or a domain? What role do social and cultural contexts play in creativity and development? Creativity and Development presents a powerful argument that both creativity scholars and developmental psychologists will benefit by becoming more familiar with each other's work.
The evocation of narrative as a way to understand the content of consciousness, including memory, autobiography, self, and imagination, has sparked truly interdisciplinary work among psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics. Even neuroscientists have taken an interest in the stories people create to understand themselves, their past, and the world around them. The research presented in this volume should appeal to researchers enmeshed in these problems, as well as the general reader with an interest in the philosophical problem of what consciousness is and how it functions in the everyday world.
John Campbell investigates how consciousness of the world explains our ability to think about the world. So your ability to think about objects you can see depends on your capacity for conscious visual attention to those things. Reference and Consciousness illuminates classical problems about thought, reference, and experience by looking at the underlying psychological mechanisms on which conscious attention depends. It is an original and stimulating contribution to philosophy and to cognitive science.
What explains our ability to refer to the objects we perceive? John
Cambell argues that our capacity for reference is explained by our
capacity to attend selectively to the objects of which we are
aware; that this capacity for conscious attention to a perceived
object is what provides us with our knowledge of reference. When
someone makes a reference to a perceived object, your knowledge of
which thing they are talking about is constituted by your
consciously attending to the relevant object. Campbell articulates
the connections between these three concepts: reference, attention,
and consciousness. He looks at the metaphysical conception of the
environment demanded by such an account, and at the demands imposed
on our conception of consciousness by the point that consciousness
of objects is what explains our capacity to think about them. He
argues that empirical work on the binding problem can illuminate
our grasp of the way in which we have knowledge of reference,
supplied by conscious attention to the relevant object.
'Mindblowing' Michael Pollan Why do we know so much more about the cosmos than our own consciousness? Are there limits to the scientific method? Why do we assume that only science, mathematics and technology reveal truth? The Flip shows us what happens when we realise that consciousness is fundamental to the cosmos and not some random evolutionary accident or surface cognitive illusion; that everything is alive, connected, and 'one'. We meet the people who have made this visionary, intuitive leap towards new forms of knowledge: Mark Twain's prophetic dreams, Marie Curie's seances, Einstein's cosmically attuned mind. But these forms of knowledge are not archaic; indeed, they are essential in a universe that has evolved specifically to be understandable by the consciousnesses we inhabit. The Flip peels back the layers of our beliefs about the world to reveal a visionary, new way of understanding ourselves and everything around us, with huge repercussions for how we live our lives. After all, once we have flipped, we understand that the cosmos is not just human. The human is also cosmic.
Consciousness concerns awareness and how we experience the world. How does awareness, a feature of the mental world, arise from the physical brain? Is a dog conscious, or a jellyfish, and what explains the difference? How is consciousness related to psychological processes such as perception and cognition? The Science of Consciousness covers the psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience of consciousness. Written for introductory courses in psychology and philosophy, this text examines consciousness with a special emphasis on current neuroscience research as well as comparisons of normal and damaged brains. The full range of normal and altered states of consciousness, including sleep and dreams, hypnotic and meditative states, anesthesia, and drug-induced states, as well as parapsychological phenomena and their importance for the science of consciousness is covered, as well as the 'higher' states and how we can attain them. Throughout the text attempts to relate consciousness to the brain.
This book is a tour-de-force on how human consciousness may have evolved. From the "phantom pain" experienced by people who have lost their limbs to the uncanny faculty of "blindsight," Humphrey argues that raw sensations are central to all conscious states and that consciousness must have evolved, just like all other mental faculties, over time from our ancestorsodily responses to pain and pleasure. '
Ernie Hollands, a career criminal, said Christ appeared to him in his cell in Millhaven Penitentiary. Maria Martinez saw Jesus at a busy intersection in Miami, Florida. Rose Fairs was tying in bed one morning when the Venetian blinds opened and the head of Jesus materialized before her. Were these people only imagining a figure that seemed life-like, or is there a chance that what they saw was, in some way, real? This first critical study of contemporary visions of Jesus offers the intriguing accounts of thirty people, most of them ordinary men and women without prior or subsequent experiences of this kind, who remain mystified about their encounters. Wiebe recounts each vision in vivid detail, exploring why these individuals believe their visions were of Jesus, and why they typically believe them to be objective happenings, rather than hallucinations or dreams. He regards the occurrences from perspectives as diverse as biblical scholarship and parapsychology, concluding that they may well represent genuine religious experiences of a mystical character. The fascinating nature of these visions and Wiebe's thoughtfuL, evenhanded approach to each report add up to a book that will be provocative reading for skeptics and the faithful alike. |
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