Getting the Blues: Vision and Cognition in the Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary study of medieval color. By integrating scientific and literary approaches, it revises our current understanding of how people in medieval Europe experienced color and what it meant to them. This book insists that the past perception of the world can be recovered by joining timeless universal constraints on human experience (discovered by science) to the unique cultural expressions of that experience (revealed by literature). The Middle Ages may evoke images of the multicolored stained glass of gothic cathedrals, the motley garb of minstrels, or the brilliant illuminations of manuscripts, yet such color often goes unnoticed in scholarly accounts of medieval literature. Getting the Blues restores some of the most important literary works of the Middle Ages to their full living color. Particular consideration is given to the twelfth-century Arthurian romances by Chretien de Troyes and the thirteenth-century Lancelot-Grail Cycle. Getting the Blues engages debates within the humanities and the sciences over universalist and relativist approaches to how humans see and name color. Scholars in the humanities often insist that color is a strictly cultural phenomenon, eschewing as irrelevant to the Middle Ages recent developments in cognitive science that show universal constraints on how people in all cultures see and name color. This book contributes to the recent cognitive turn in the humanities and sheds new light on some of the most frequent and meaningful cultural experiences in the Middle Ages: the perception, use, and naming of color.

For psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists interested in 'attention', the issue of the 'limits' of our attentional mechanisms is one of great importance and topicality- what are the temporal constraints when we attend to and process information How well can we switch our attention from one task to another, or from one sensory modality to another? In what circumstances can the presentation of one stimulus prevent the recognition of a further stimulus? By seeking answers to such questions, we can learn a great deal about the systems underlying such attentional processes, develop more accurate models of our attentional mechanisms, and even get closer to answering some of the many outstanding questions about consciousness itself. In The limits of attention, Kimron Shapiro whose own work on the 'attentional blink' is central to this debate, has brought together a high quality team of attention researchers to discuss and debate these issues, key to the study of attention. This is an important book for cognitive psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and philosophers.

This book collects both classic and contemporary articles in visual perception, providing the reader with an overview of key research ideas as they first appeared. The articles span a century of research: the earliest was published in 1894, the most recent in 1997. There are examples from each of the many disciplines that have contributed to our current understanding of vision, including experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurophysiology, and functional neuroimaging. The topics include theoretical perspectives, early vision, perceptual organization and constancy, object and spatial vision, and visual attention and awareness. A brief introduction to each article by the editor provides an intellectual context and pointers to subsequent developments. Suggestions for further reading and discussion questions provide a framework for students to strengthen their understanding of different topics.
This book will be an excellent source of supplementary readings in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course in vision, or a stand-alone text for an in-depth graduate seminar. Professionals in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, visual science, and cognitive science will find this a valuable addition to their personal libraries.

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Concentrating mainly on visual perception, this book introduces students to the basic biological and psychological processes and their development. It discusses influences on perception such as pattern recognition, culture and attention and includes a brief discussion of Artificial intelligence.

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Larry M. Jorgensen provides a systematic reappraisal of Leibniz's philosophy of mind, revealing the full metaphysical background that allowed Leibniz to see farther than most of his contemporaries. In recent philosophy much effort has been put into discovering a naturalized theory of mind. Leibniz's efforts to reach a similar goal three hundred years earlier offer a critical stance from which we can assess our own theories. But while the goals might be similar, the content of Leibniz's theory significantly diverges from that of today's thought. Perhaps surprisingly, Leibniz's theological commitments yielded a thoroughgoing naturalizing methodology: the properties of an object are explicable in terms of the object's nature. Larry M. Jorgensen shows how this methodology led Leibniz to a fully natural theory of mind.

How do you feel when you bite into a pear wear a feather boa stand in a noisy auditorium or look for a friend in a crowd? It's likely that one of these situations would be pleasant for you, and perhaps one would be unpleasant. Some people will adore the grainy texture of a pear, while others will shudder at the idea of this texture in their mouths. Touching a feather boa will be fun and luxurious to some, and others will bristle at the idea of all those feathers brushing on the skin. Noisy, busy environments will energize some people, and will overwhelm others. These different reactions reflect people's individual sensory patterns, which in turn affect the way we react to everything that happens to us throughout the day. Living Sensationally identifies four major sensory types: Seekers, Bystanders, Avoiders and Sensors. The author helps readers to find their own patterns and the patterns of those around them, and then offers suggestions for harnessing this knowledge to make their lives more in synch with their sensations. Living Sensationally provides practical sensory ideas for individuals, families and businesses. Armed with the information in Living Sensationally, people will be able to pick just the right kind of clothing, job and home and know why they are making such choices.

This two-volume set was developed to help researchers and practitioners select measures to be used in the evaluation of human/machine systems. It can also be used to supplement classes at both the undergraduate and graduate courses in ergonomics, experimental psychology, human factors, human performance, measurement, and system test and evaluation. Volume 1 of the handbook begins with an overview of the steps involved in developing a test to measure human performance, workload, and/or situational awareness. This is followed by a definition of human performance and a review of human performance measures. Situational Awareness is similarly treated in a subsequent chapter. Volume 2 presents a definition of workload and a review of workload measures. Provides a short engineering tutorial on experimental design Offers readily accessible information on human performance, workload, and situational awareness (SA) measures Presents general description of the measure Covers data collection, reduction, and analysis requirement Details out the strengths and limitations or restrictions of each measure, including any known proprietary rights or restrictions, as well as validity and reliability data

Our species is misnamed. Though sapiens defines human beings as "wise" what humans do especially well is to prospect the future. We are homo prospectus. In this book, Martin E. P. Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada argue it is anticipating and evaluating future possibilities for the guidance of thought and action that is the cornerstone of human success. Much of the history of psychology has been dominated by a framework in which people's behavior is driven by past history (memory) and present circumstances (perception and motivation). Homo Prospectus reassesses this idea, pushing focus to the future front and center and opening discussion of a new field of Psychology and Neuroscience. The authors delve into four modes in which prospection operates: the implicit mind, deliberate thought, mind-wandering, and collective (social) imagination. They then explore prospection's role in some of life's most enduring questions: Why do people think about the future? Do we have free will? What is the nature of intuition, and how might it function in ethics? How does emotion function in human psychology? Is there a common causal process in different psychopathologies? Does our creativity change with age? In this remarkable convergence of research in philosophy, statistics, decision theory, psychology, and neuroscience, Homo Prospectus shows how human prospection fundamentally reshapes our understanding of key cognitive processes, thereby improving individual and social functioning. It aims to galvanize interest in this new science from scholars in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, as well as an educated public curious about what makes humanity what it is.

A topic of universal concern that touches everyone, philosophy of meaning in life has roots in spiritual and religious movements in almost all cultures. Many of the issues dealt with in these movements, such as human vocation, the life worth living, our relation to what is "greater" than us, and our encounters with suffering and with death, are also discussed (even if in a different manner) in the philosophy of meaning in life. However, only recently has the topic received elaborate discussion within analytic philosophy, and become a thriving field of research. This volume presents thirty-two chapters by leading authorities in their respective subfields on a wide array of subjects in meaning in life research. The chapters are organized into six sections. Section I focuses on ways of conceptualizing life's meaning. It discusses, among other issues, whether meaning in life should be understood objectively or subjectively, the relation between meaningfulness and importance, and whether meaningful lives should be understood narratively. Section II, Meaning in Life, Science, and Metaphysics, presents opposing views on whether neuroscience sheds light on life's meaning, inquires whether determinism must render life meaningless, and explores the relation between time, personal identity, and meaning in life. Section III considers life's meaning from both atheist and theist perspectives, and examines the relation between meaningfulness, mysticism and transcendence. Section IV, Ethics and Meaning in Life, examines (among other issues) whether meaningful lives must be moral, how important forgiveness is for meaning, the implications of life's meaningfulness or meaninglessness for procreation ethics, and whether animals can have meaningful lives. Section V compares philosophical and psychological research on life's meaning, explores the experience of meaningfulness, and discusses the relation between meaningfulness and desire, love, and gratitude. Finally, section VI, Living Meaningfully: Challenges and Prospects, elaborates on meaning in life and topics such as suicide, suffering, education, optimism and pessimism. Many of the chapters deal with topics that have never before been discussed in the literature. This handbook presents ground-breaking work within a rapidly developing field and offers the first published scholarly companion to the philosophical study if meaning in life.

Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans, a collection of original articles on self-awareness in monkeys, apes, humans, and other species, focuses on controversies about how to measure self-awareness, which species are capable of self-awareness and which are not, and why. Several chapters focus on the controversial question of whether gorillas, like other great apes and human infants, are capable of mirror self-recognition (MSR) or whether they are anomalously unable to do so. Other chapters focus on whether macaque monkeys are capable of MSR. The focus of the chapters is both comparative and developmental: several contributors explore the value of frameworks from human developmental psychology for comparative studies. This dual focus - comparative and developmental - reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the volume, which brings together biological anthropologists, comparative and developmental psychologists, and cognitive scientists from Japan, France, Spain, Hungary, New Zealand, Scotland and the United States.

In simple prose Merleau-Ponty touches on his principle themes. He speaks about the body and the world, the coexistence of space and things, the unfortunate optimism of science – and also the insidious stickiness of honey, and the mystery of anger.' - James Elkins

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was one of the most important thinkers of the post-war era. Central to his thought was the idea that human understanding comes from our bodily experience of the world that we perceive: a deceptively simple argument, perhaps, but one that he felt had to be made in the wake of attacks from contemporary science and the philosophy of Descartes on the reliability of human perception.

From this starting point, Merleau-Ponty presented these seven lectures on The World of Perception to French radio listeners in 1948. Available in a paperback English translation for the first time in the Routledge Classics series to mark the centenary of Merleau-Ponty’s birth, this is a dazzling and accessible guide to a whole universe of experience, from the pursuit of scientific knowledge, through the psychic life of animals to the glories of the art of Paul Cézanne.

Table of Contents

foreword by stephanie menase -- Introduction by Thomas Baldwin -- The World of Perception and the World of Science -- Exploring the World of Perception: Space -- Exploring the World of Perception: Sensory Objects -- Exploring the World of Perception: Animal Life -- Man Seen from the Outside -- Art and the World of Perception -- Classical World, Modern World -- notes -- index

In Perception: First Form of Mind, Tyler Burge develops an understanding of the most primitive type of mental representational: perception. Focusing on the functions and capacities of perceptual states, Burge accounts for their representational content and structure, and develops a formal semantics for them. The discussion explains the role of iconic format in the structure. It also situates the accounts of content, structure, and semantics within scientific explanations of perceptual-state formation, emphasizing formation of perceptual categorization. In the book's second half, Burge discusses what a perceptual system is. Exploration of relations between perception and other primitive capacities-conation, attention, memory, anticipation, affect, learning, and imagining-helps distinguish perceiving, with its associated capacities, from thinking, with its associated capacities. Drawing mainly on vision science, not introspection, Perception: First Form of Mind is a rigorous, agenda-setting work in philosophy of perception and philosophy of science.

Harmony, the bringing together of dissimilar elements in a manner that coordinates these as parts of an organic whole, is central to different aspects of human existence. In many cultures, harmony is considered an important virtue. As a personal, social, or environmental accomplishment, harmony has a place in everyday conversation, political discourse, as well as academic scholarship. In most Western societies, however, it has no such presence. This volume introduces the virtue of harmony as a central aspect of the good life into global ethics discourse, and shapes the trajectory of ethics research in a manner that draws upon the resources of a broad variety of cultural traditions. The volume comprises thirteen essays that examine harmony against different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. A broad variety of cultural traditions are represented, including the Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist, Judaist, Greek, Christian, Islamic, African, and Native American traditions. The volume's essays also represent different disciplinary approaches, such as philosophy, religious studies, linguistics, psychology, and political theory. Each contribution focuses on some aspect of what harmony as a personal trait, social disposition, or environmental outlook entails and describes how the virtue may be cultivated-either by examining the way in which it has been discussed in specific traditions of ethical, religious, or political thought, or by developing a cross-cultural analysis of the theory and practice of the virtue of harmony.

Speech Perception and Spoken Word Recognition features contributions from the field's leading scientists, and covers recent developments and current issues in the study of cognitive and neural mechanisms that take patterns of air vibrations and turn them 'magically' into meaning. The volume makes a unique theoretical contribution in linking behavioural and cognitive neuroscience research, and cutting across traditional strands of study, such as adult and developmental processing. The book: Focusses on the state of the art in the study of speech perception and spoken word recognition Discusses the interplay between behavioural and cognitive neuroscience evidence, and between adult and developmental research Evaluates key theories in the field and relates them to recent empirical advances, including the relationship between speech perception and speech production, meaning representation and real-time activation, and bilingual and monolingual spoken word recognition Examines emerging areas of study such as word learning and time-course of memory consolidation, and how the science of human speech perception can help computer speech recognition Overall this book presents a renewed focus on theoretical and developmental issues, as well as a multifaceted and broad review of the state of research, in speech perception and spoken word recognition. Particularly interested readers will be researchers of psycholinguistics and adjoining fields as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1966, Eye and Brain has established itself worldwide as an essential introduction to the basic phenomena of visual perception. Richard Gregory offers clear explanations of how we see brightness, movement, color, and objects, and he explores the phenomena of visual illusions to establish principles about how perception normally works and why it sometimes fails. Illusion continues to be a major theme in the book, which provides a comprehensive classification system. There are also sections on what babies see and how they learn to see, on motion perception, the relationship between vision and consciousness, and on the impact of new brain imaging techniques.

This book discusses human perception and performance within the framework of the theory of self-organizing systems. To that end, it presents a variety of phenomena and experimental findings in the research field, and provides an introduction to the theory of self-organization, with a focus on amplitude equations, order parameter and Lotka-Volterra equations. The book demonstrates that relating the experimental findings to the mathematical models provides an explicit account for the causal nature of human perception and performance. In particular, the notion of determinism versus free will is discussed in this context. The book is divided into four main parts, the first of which discusses the relationship between the concept of determinism and the fundamental laws of physics. The second part provides an introduction to using the self-organization approach from physics to understand human perception and performance, a strategy used throughout the remainder of the book to connect experimental findings and mathematical models. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on investigating performance guided by perception: climbing stairs and grasping tools are presented in detail. Perceptually relevant bifurcation parameters in the mathematical models are also identified, e.g. in the context of walk-to-run gait transitions. Chains of perceptions and actions together with their underlying mechanisms are then presented, and a number of experimental phenomena - such as selective attention, priming, child play, bistable perception, retrieval-induced forgetting, functional fixedness and memory effects exhibiting hysteresis with positive or negative sign - are discussed. Human judgment making, internal experiences such as dreaming and thinking, and Freud's concept of consciousness are also addressed. The fourth and last part of the book explores several specific topics such as learning, social interactions between two people, life trajectories, and applications in clinical psychology. In particular, episodes of mania and depression under bipolar disorder, perception under schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive rituals are discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology, physics, applied mathematics, kinesiology, and the sport sciences who want to learn about the foundations of the field. Written for a mixed audience, the experiments and concepts are presented using non-technical language throughout. In addition, each chapter includes more advanced sections for modelers in the fields of physics and applied mathematics.

This volume provides an introduction to and review of key contemporary debates concerning connectionism, and the nature of explanation and methodology in cognitive psychology.
The first debate centers on the question of whether human cognition is best modeled by classical or by connectionist architectures. The second centres on the question of the compatibility between folk, or commonsense, psychological explanation and explanations based on connectionist models of cognition. Each of the two sections includes a classic reading along with important responses, and concludes with a specially commissioned reply by the main contributor. The editorial introductions provide a comprehensive survey and map through the debates.

There have been two main traditions of writing on ethics in the Islamic tradition, one philosophical and related to the works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, represented by thinkers such as Avicenna, and one theological, represented by such figures as the famous theologian al-Qadi Abd al-Jabbar. Some later scholars attempted to combine those two traditions. For the most part, however, the views of the jurists have been ignored. Abdulaziz Sachedina here calls attention to this third tradition of ethics, which has its home in legal literature. The problem is that Islamic jurists did not produce a genre of ethical manuals, and their form of ethics, which Sachedina terms juridical ethics, must be derived or extracted from works that ostensibly treat legal rulings and obligations, or scriptural hermeneutics and legal theory. Presenting an outline of the version of Islamic ethics that is embedded in the textual legacy of the Islamic legal tradition, he argues that this juridical ethics is an important, even dominant form of ethics in modern Islam. He notes that this form of ethics has been challenged by modernity and examines the variety of ways in which legal ethical thinkers have reacted. How do Muslim religious leaders come to grips with modern demands of directing their communities to live as modern citizens of nation-states? What kind of moral and spiritual resources are being garnered by their scholars to respond to the new issues in sciences, more immediately in medicine, and constantly changing social relationships? To answer these pressing questions, it is necessary to go beyond the philosophical ethics of virtue and human character and acknowledge the importance of ethics to the formulation in Muslim interpretive jurisprudence of religious and moral decisions that are based on reason and revelation.

We all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person's thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else's mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.

Our experience of objects (and consequently our theorizing about them) is very rich. We perceive objects as possessing individuation conditions. They appear to have boundaries in space and time, for example, and they appear to move independently of a background of other objects or a landscape. In Ontology Without Boundaries Jody Azzouni undertakes an analysis of our concept of object, and shows what about that notion is truly due to the world and what about it is a projection onto the world of our senses and thinking. Location and individuation conditions are our product: there is no echo of them in the world. Features, the ways that objects seem to be, aren't projections. Azzouni shows how the resulting austere metaphysics tames a host of ancient philosophical problems about constitution ("Ship of Theseus," "Sorities"), as well as contemporary puzzles about reductionism. In addition, it's shown that the same sorts of individuation conditions for properties, which philosophers use to distinguish between various kinds of odd abstracta-universals, tropes, and so on, are also projections. Accompanying our notion of an object is a background logic that makes cogent ontological debate about anything from Platonic objects to Bigfoot. Contemporary views about this background logic ("quantifier variance") make ontological debate incoherent. Azzouni shows how a neutral interpretation of quantifiers and quantifier domains makes sense of both philosophical and pre-philosophical ontological debates. Azzouni also shows how the same apparatus makes sense of our speaking about a host of items-Mickey Mouse, unicorns, Martians-that nearly all of us deny exist. It's allowed by what Azzouni shows about the background logic of our ontological debates, as well as the semantics of the language of those debates that we can disagree over the existence of things, like unicorns, without that background logic and semantics forcing ontological commitments onto speakers that they don't have.

This book elucidates the poetics of Philodemus of Gadara, a first century BCE Epicurean philosopher and poet, whose On Poems survives in extensive fragments among the Herculaneum papyri. Although his treatise was primarily polemical and lacks positive exposition, his views are often recoverable from a careful reading of the debates, occasional direct evidence, and attention to his basic Epicurean commitments. His main critical principle is that form and content are inseparable and mutually-reinforcing: a change in one means a change in the other. The poet uses this marriage of form and content to create the psychological effect of the poem in the audience. This effect is hard to pin down exactly. Poems produce "additional thoughts" in the audience, and these entertain them. It seems clear that Philodemus expected good poets to arrange form and content suggestively, so that the poems could exert a lasting pull on the minds of the audience. Additionally, this book summarizes the views of Philodemus' opponents, the technical terminology of literary criticism in the Hellenistic period, and the history of Epicureanism's engagement with poetics. Epicurus did not write an On Poems but Metrodorus did, and this is probably Philodemus' touchstone for his own views. Zeno of Sidon, Demetrius Laco, Siro, and other Epicureans are examined as well. The book concludes with an appendix of topics examined by Philodemus, such as genre, mimesis, "appropriateness," utility, and various technical terms.

The new edition of this comprehensive text continues to provide a detailed and up-to-date account of research on visual perception, while maintaining the emphasis of earlier editions on the functional context of vision. Reflecting recent theoretical developments, the book is organised around the distinction between two broad functions of vision, to provide awareness and to control action.
In Part I, the account of visual processing in the brain has been extensively updated, and evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology has been integrated into a critical account of the 'two pathways' theory of visual cortex. The revision of chapters in Part II has given particular attention to recent advances in integrating psychophysical, physiological and computational approaches to problems such as the perception of surfaces and of motion. With the help of new illustrations, full introductions are provided to the key mathematical concepts used in these areas. In Part III, three new chapters draw on evidence from both animal and human behaviour to cover optic flow and locomotion, the timing of actions, and perception of the social world. The concluding chapter considers critically the wider theoretical implications of the distinction between awareness and action as separate functions of vision.
Visual Perception, Fourth Edition will be an invaluable resource for both undergraduate and postgraduate students of psychology, biology, physiology and neuroscience, as well as researchers in the fields of visual neuroscience, visual perception and animal behaviour.

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The cooperative action of different regions of our brains gives us an amazing capacity to perform activities as diverse as playing the piano and hitting a tennis ball. Somehow, without conscious effort, our eyes find the information we need to operate successfully in the world around us. The development of head-mounted eye trackers over recent years has made it possible to record where we look during different active tasks, and so work out what information our eyes supply to the brain systems that control our limbs. We are now in a position to explore the strategies that the eye movement system uses in the initiation and guidance of action.
Looking and Acting examines a wide range of visually guided behaviour, from sedentary tasks like reading and drawing, to dynamic activities such as driving and playing cricket. A central theme is that the eye movement system has its own knowledge about where to find the most appropriate information for guiding action - information not usually available to conscious scrutiny. Thus each type of action has its own specific repertoire of linked eye movements, acquired in parallel with the motor skills themselves. Starting with a brief background to eye movement studies, the book then reviews a range of observations and analyses of different activities. It ends with discussions of the nature of visual representation, the neurophysiology of the systems involved, and the roles of attention and learning.
Opening a field in eye movement research, this fascinating book will be of great interest to all vision scientists (psychologists, physiologists, ophthalmologists) whether at professional, graduate, or advanced undergraduate levels. It will also be of value to musicians, artists, sports scientists, and transport engineers, and indeed anyone intrigued by the way we sample the visual world.

Vision dominates philosophical thinking about perception, and theorizing about experience in cognitive science has traditionally focused on a visual model. In a radical departure from established practice, Casey O'Callaghan provides a systematic treatment of sound and sound experience, and shows how thinking about audition and appreciating the relationships between multiple sense modalities can enrich our understanding of perception and the mind.
Sounds proposes a novel theory of sounds and auditory perception. Against the widely accepted philosophical view that sounds are among the secondary or sensible qualities, O'Callaghan argues that, on any perceptually plausible account, sounds are events. But this does not imply that sounds are waves that propagate through a medium, such as air or water. Rather, sounds are events that take place in one's environment at or near the objects and happenings that bring them about. This account captures the way in which sounds essentially are creatures of time, and situates sounds in a world populated by items and events that have significance for us. Sounds are not ethereal, mysterious entities.
O'Callaghan's account of sounds and their perception discloses far greater variety among the kinds of things we perceive than traditional views acknowledge. But more importantly, investigating sounds and audition demonstrates that considering other sense modalities teaches what we could not otherwise learn from thinking exclusively about the visual. Sounds articulates a powerful account of echoes, reverberation, Doppler effects, and perceptual constancies that surpasses the explanatory richness of alternative theories, and also reveals a number of surprising cross-modal perceptual illusions. O'Callaghan argues that such illusions demonstrate that the perceptual modalities cannot be completely understood in isolation, and that the visuocentric model for theorizing about perception - according to which perceptual modalities are discrete modes of experience and autonomous domains of philosophical and scientific inquiry - ought to be abandoned.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.
In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day's events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your 'thoughts') suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the 'gray areas' in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.