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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Physiological & neuro-psychology
This volume offers an introduction to consciousness research within philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, from a philosophical perspective and with an emphasis on the history of ideas and core concepts. The book begins by examining consciousness as a modern mystery. Thereafter, the book introduces philosophy of mind and the mind-body problem, and proceeds to explore psychological, philosophical and neuroscientific approaches to mind and consciousness. The book then presents a discussion of mysterianist views of consciousness in response to what can be perceived as insurmountable scientific challenges to the problem of consciousness. As a response to mysterianist views, the next chapters examine radical approaches to rethinking the problem of consciousness, including externalist approaches. The final two chapters present the author's personal view of the problem of consciousness. Consciousness remains a mystery for contemporary science-a mystery raising many questions. Why does consciousness persist as a mystery? Are we humans not intelligent enough to solve the riddle of consciousness? If we can solve this mystery, what would it take? What research would we need to conduct? Moreover, the mystery of consciousness prompts the larger question of how well the cognitive sciences have actually advanced our understanding of ourselves as human beings. After all, consciousness is not just a minor part of our existence. Without consciousness, we would not be human beings at all. This book aims to increase the accessibility of major ideas in the field of consciousness research and to inspire readers to contribute to the ongoing discussion of the place of consciousness in nature.
This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism. Cooperation is one of life's fundamental principles. We are all made of parts - genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or 'memes'. Our societies too are made of parts - us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process? From the smallest component parts of our bodies and minds to our complicated societies, everywhere cooperation is the organizing principle. Often this cooperation has emerged because the constituting parts have benefited from the interactions, but not seldom the cooperating units appear to lose on the interaction. How then to explain cooperation? How can we understand our intricate societies where we regularly provide small and large favors for people we are unrelated to, know, or even never expect to meet again? Where does the idea come from that it is right to risk one's life for country, religion or freedom? The answers seem to reside in the two processes that have shaped humanity: biological and cultural evolution.
In his most extraordinary book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks recounts the stories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. These are case studies of people who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people or common objects; whose limbs have become alien; who are afflicted and yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. In Dr Sacks's splendid and sympathetic telling, each tale is a unique and deeply human study of life struggling against incredible adversity. 'Oliver Sacks has become the world's best-known neurologist. His case studies of broken minds offer brilliant insight into the mysteries of consciousness' - Guardian
The major focus of this book is on the differences between ecological approaches to action (`action theories'), and theories on motor control and learning couched in terms of information processing (`motor theories'). Proponents of both approaches express their views in Part 1 and the differences between the approaches are further analysed. Part 2 presents empirical studies, while in Part 3, methodological, philosophical and scientific implications are discussed and the possibility of a solution is considered.
This authoritative reference examines in depth the myriad challenges facing pediatric cancer survivors and proposes a robust framework for structured follow-up of these patients through adulthood. Approaches to long-term follow-up include both established models of care and targeted models of lifelong surveillance of late effects by bodily systems and neurological outcomes. Sections devoted to quality of life and re-entry after treatment focus on key concerns such as health risk behaviors, school and career issues, psychological challenges, and care disparities. And a robust resources section adds extra usefulness to the expert coverage. Among the Handbook's topics: * Developmental considerations in the transition from child and adolescent to adult survivorship. * Long-term follow-up roadmaps by disease and treatment. * Neuropsychological effects of pediatric brain tumors and associated treatment. * Building resiliency in childhood cancer survivors: a clinician's perspective. * School issues and educational strategies for survivors of childhood cancer. * Educating and preparing the childhood cancer survivor for long-term care: a curriculum model for cancer centers. A work of rare scope, scholarship, and clinical acumen, the Handbook of Long-Term Care of the Childhood Cancer Survivor is a rewarding, practice-building resource essential to a wide range of healing professionals, including primary care physicians, pediatricians, oncologists, nurses, psychologists, neuropsychologists, child psychologists, and licensed therapists.
Psychology is a diverse assortment of fields with distinct referents, often using the same terms, and it is not always easy to identify its shared assumptions. At base, the academic variants tend to include the notion that mental activity takes place in hard-to-access inner spaces, making it more appropriate to study behavioral manifestations of it, yet all of it can be represented in an expert language with a confusing relationship to physiological mechanisms. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking: Critical and Historical Perspectives focuses on several key areas in psychology: learning, the brain, child development, and psychotherapy, and identifies several conceptual tensions that ground psychological understanding of various phenomena. These include a tension between "inside" and "outside," structure and function, higher and lower, and description and explanation; all have historically generated confusion at the heart of the discipline. As psychology was transformed into the study of consciousness in the late nineteenth century, and the science of behavior in the early twentieth, the disciplines of psychology struggled to distinguish between what was properly inside and what was outside mind, person, and organism as well as what forms the study of these "insides" would take. Additionally, it was unclear how to reconceive the traditional structures of the post-Cartesian mind in the terms of evolutionary functionalism without losing sight of the fact that the mind has its own organization or the historical connection between mind and higher forms of being. Psychology's influence today, particularly that of post-Freudian therapeutics, has extended far beyond the university, creating a therapeutic sensibility by which Westerners make sense of themselves and their world. An Advanced Guide to Psychological Thinking performs the vital task of helping psychology recognize its own foundations.
This edited collection will provide an overview of the field of physiological computing, i.e. the use of physiological signals as input for computer control. It will cover a breadth of current research, from brain-computer interfaces to telemedicine.
Clinical neuropsychology for infants and young children is an emerging field that contains as much promise as it does perplexing practical and theoretical questions. Infant and Early Childhood Neuropsychology is a groundbreaking study that provides an assessment framework and diagnostic clues for clinicians and researchers, as well as the first documentation and description of this new field for students. The clearly written text translates neuroanatomic issues into clinical applications for professionals charged with making neuropsychological assessments of infants and young children.
In our industrialized world, we are surrounded by occupational, recreational, and environmental noise. Very loud noise damages the inner-ear receptors and results in hearing loss, subsequent problems with communication in the presence of background noise, and, potentially, social isolation. There is much less public knowledge about the noise exposure that produces only temporary hearing loss but that in the long term results in hearing problems due to the damage of high-threshold auditory nerve fibers. Early exposures of this kind, such as in neonatal intensive care units, manifest themselves at a later age, sometimes as hearing loss but more often as an auditory processing disorder. There is even less awareness about changes in the auditory brain caused by repetitive daily exposure to the same type of low-level occupational or musical sound. This low-level, but continuous, environmental noise exposure is well known to affect speech understanding, produce non-auditory problems ranging from annoyance and depression to hypertension, and to cause cognitive difficulties. Additionally, internal noise, such as tinnitus, has effects on the brain similar to low-level external noise. "Noise and the Brain" discusses and provides a synthesis of hte
underlying brain mechanisms as well as potential ways to prvent or
alleviate these aberrant brain changes caused by noise
exposure.
The toughness model proposed in this book incorporates psychological research and neuroscience to explain how a variety of toughening activities - ranging from confronting mental and physical challenges to meditation - sustain our brains and bodies, and ultimately build our mental and psychological capacities degenerated by stress and by aging.
Part I considers theoretical perspectives in bridging developmental neuroscience with child psychology, with the role of neuroscience furthering our understanding of the child's mental development, and a separate chapter outlines the importance of plasticity in this growth. Chapters also cover methodological issues arising from epidemiological perspectives and from psychometric concepts and issues. Methods for measuring biological brain function and structure and their particular application to child neuropsychological disorders are covered next, including ERP, PET, SPECT, MRI and fMRI technologies. Included is a chapter devoted to childhood seizure disorders. Separate chapters follow on neuropsychological assessment in infancy, in the preschool child, and in school-aged children. Following this are presentations on the development of motor control, including handedness, and somatosensory perception.
Changes in the focus of neurological practice worldwide have led to the need for new standard texts that reflect the current state of this expanding area of clinical expertise. The second edition of the Handbook of Neurological Rehabilitation is a major reference source that fulfils this need, providing an invaluable resource for all professions that work with patients suffering from neurological disorders. It brings restorative neurology to the bedside and shows how a reiterative, goal-oriented, problem-solving training programme can benefit patients, sometimes on a scale not achieved by pharmacological or surgical interventions. The book is divided into three sections all of which have been updated. Section One explores the clinical and biological principles underpinning rehabilitation practice in the context of neurological disablement. Section Two describes the assessment, treatment, and management of the major physical, cognitive and behavioural impairments, and the resulting functional deficits that may follow or accompany neurological disease. The final section explores in more detail these problems and their management in relation to the more common specific disorders of the nervous system. The text emphasises the fact that rehabilitation is an ongoing process involving multidisciplinary problem-solving, goal-setting and education; in which organised care is more effective than unorganised care; and the breakdown of professional barriers within rehabilitation, to facilitate the use of combined treatment techniques, improves outcome. It describes the contribution made by neural reorganisation and compensatory mechanisms to recovery of function, focuses on the avoidance of secondary deficit, and explores the physical, cognitive, affective and behavioural problems that may occur after neurological damage. At a time when new medical technologies threaten to fragment the integrity of medical care at individual and societal levels, it is crucial that all those involved in the management of chronic neurological disease have a working knowledge of the contents of this book. Their perspective on clinical practice will then be truly integrated and holistic and their patients will benefit accordingly.
The Structure of Personality identifies the process of producing a personality, and presents strategies that will reprogramme personality. Coaching the reader in a number of effective and specially adapted NLP techniques, it includes tools such as The RESOLVE model and the Personal Strengths model, making it an essential reference for counsellors, therapists and NLP practitioners. "A major step in creating a cognitive map using Neuro-Semantics and Neuro-Linguistic Programming to understand the relationship between a person's thinking and his or her personality development." Jim Walsh MA, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Certified School Psychologist, Certified Neuro-Semantics and Neuro-Linguistics Trainer. An exciting new book already proving extremely popular.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s David Marr produced three astonishing papers in which he gave a detailed account of how the fine structure and known cell types of the cerebellum, hippocampus and neocortex perform the functions that they do. Marr went on to become one of the main founders of Computational Neuroscience. In his classic work 'Vision' he distinguished between the computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels, and the three early theories concerned implementation. However, they were produced when Neuroscience was in its infancy. Now that so much more is known, it is timely to revisit these early theories to see to what extent they are still valid and what needs to be altered to produce viable theories that stand up to current evidence. This book brings together some of the most distinguished scientists in their fields to evaluate Marr's legacy. After a general introduction there are three chapters on the cerebellum, three on the hippocampus and two on the neocortex. The book ends with an appreciation of the life of David Marr by Lucia Vaina.
"Biological Research on Addiction" examines the neurobiological mechanisms of drug use and drug addiction, describing how the brain responds to addictive substances as well as how it is affected by drugs of abuse. The book's four main sections examine behavioral and molecular biology; neuroscience; genetics; and neuroimaging and neuropharmacology as they relate to the addictive process. This volume is especially effective in presenting current knowledge on the key neurobiological and genetic elements in an individual s susceptibility to drug dependence, as well as the processes by which some individuals proceed from casual drug use to drug dependence. "Biological Research on Addiction" is one of three volumes
comprising the 2,500-page series, "Comprehensive Addictive
Behaviors and Disorders." This series provides the most complete
collection of current knowledge on addictive behaviors and
disorders to date. In short, it is the definitive reference work on
addictions.
"Principles of Addiction "provides a solid understanding of the definitional and diagnostic differences between use, abuse, and disorder. It describes in great detail the characteristics of these syndromes and various etiological models. The book's three main sections examine the nature of addiction, including epidemiology, symptoms, and course; alcohol and drug use among adolescents and college students; and detailed descriptions of a wide variety of addictive behaviors and disorders, encompassing not only drugs and alcohol, but caffeine, food, gambling, exercise, sex, work, social networking, and many other areas. This volume is especially important in providing a basic introduction to the field as well as an in-depth review of our current understanding of the nature and process of addictive behaviors. "Principles of Addiction" is one of three volumes comprising the
2,500-page series, "Comprehensive Addictive Behaviors and
Disorders." This series provides the most complete collection of
current knowledge on addictive behaviors and disorders to date. In
short, it is the definitive reference work on addictions.
This volume develops a comprehensive multivariate paradigm of the process of aging, delineating the factors underlying age-related degeneration. The model is aimed at understanding the conditions under which age sets into motion a process of degeneration. Accumulating evidence suggests that age per se is not the decisive factor in age-related regression--leading scholars to distinguish between chronological and functional age. The process of degeneration is evidently due to the combined impact of deleterious biophysiological, psychological, and socio-cultural factors and the interaction among them. Based on this evidence, Zeev Ben-Sira shows how age-related degeneration can be viewed as a product of a damaging cycle of reciprocally activating stimuli from the person's internal and external environment. Consequently, aging is conceptualized as a process of bio-psychosocial regression. The paradigm outlined in this volume identifies factors that are likely to accelerate or decelerate the process of aging.
This well-established international series examines major areas of
basic and clinical research within neuroscience, as well as
emerging and promising subfields.This volume explores
interdisciplinary research on decision making taking a neural and
behavioural approach
This volume contains selected and edited papers from the 7th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM 7) held in Durham, UK on August 31-September 3 1993. The volume is organized as follows: - Invited Lectures, Pursuit and Co-Ordination, Saccade and Fixation Control, Oculomotor Physiology, Clinical and Medical Aspects of Eye Movements, Eye Movements and Cognition, Eye Movements and Language and finally, Displays and Applications
Sigmund Freud pioneered the study of the human unconscious-not only on the motivation and behavior of the individual but also as a factor in culture. Here, Freud applies his theories to the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and religion. This collection of four essays-written in 1912-3 and originally appearing in the journal *Imago*-includes: [ "The savage's dread of incest" [ "Taboo and the ambivalence of emotions" [ "Animism, magic and the omnipotence of thought" [ "The infantile recurrence of totemism" Initially rejected by those who study culture, Freud's methods were later adopted by many ethnographers, and this remains a vital work for approaching cultural issues today. Austrian psychiatrist SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) developed psychoanalysis-dialogue between doctor and patient-as a tool for understanding and curing psychopathologies. While some of his ideas have been supplanted by subsequent research and refinement, his work continues to profoundly influence the sciences and the humanities alike.
Previously published as "Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence
Love, Sex, and Relationships."
This study examines the suffering narratives of the Bimo and Christian religious communities of the Yi minority who reside in the remote mountains of Sichuan and Yunnan, China, respectively. It is informed by the theoretical framework of ecological rationality, which posits that religions influence and are influenced by cognitive styles that have co-evolved with the ecological niche of a culture. It was predicted and found that in times of adversity, traditional religious communities differ in emotion expression, causal attribution, and help-seeking behavior, with far-reaching ramifications for how they are uniquely vulnerable to the ravages of modernization. The authors hope that the voices of the study participants, heard through their harrowing narratives, may inspire a deepened sensitivity to the plight of rural Chinese communities as China races to become a superpower in the global economy.
This comprehensive yet brief overview of the adolescent human
brain discusses how the brain develops during this critical period
of life and how that development impacts decision-making and
risk-taking behavior in the adolescent. This originated as a white paper requested by the Canadian government for a specific group looking to understand adolescent brain development in the context of adolescent behavior. The paper was not made available to the Canadian government outside of the specific task force that requested it nor to the general public. The authors have since decided that having put so much effort into concisely summarizing research on adolescent brain development, it would be a useful addition to researchers in psychology generally. The original paper has since been updated and revised considerably. |
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