Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Physiological & neuro-psychology
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The Autonomous Brain - A Neural Theory of Attention and Learning (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,695
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The Autonomous Brain - A Neural Theory of Attention and Learning (Paperback)
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The behaviorist credo that animals are devices for translating
sensory input into appropriate responses dies hard. The thesis of
this pathbreaking book is that the brain is innately constructed to
initiate behaviors likely to promote the survival of the species,
and to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those
behaviors. Animals attend innately to vital stimuli (reinforcers)
and the more advanced animals learn to attend to related stimuli as
well. Thus, the centrifugal attentional components of sensory
systems are as important for learned behavior as the more
conventional paths. It is hypothesized that the basal ganglia are
an important source of response plans and attentional signals. This
reversal of traditional learning theory, along with the rapid
expansion of knowledge about the brain, especially that acquired by
improved techniques for recording neural activity in behaving
animals and people, makes it possible to re-examine some long
standing psychological problems. One such problem is how the
intention to perform an act selects sensory input from relevant
objects and ensures that it alone is delivered to the motor system
to control the intended response. This is an aspect of what is
sometimes known as the binding problem: how the different features
of an observed object are integrated into a unified percept.
Another problem that has never been satisfactorily addressed is how
the brain stores information concerning temporal order, a
requirement for the production of most learned responses, including
pronouncing and writing words. A fundamental process, the
association between brain activities representing external events,
is surprisingly poorly understood at the neural level. Most
concepts have multiple associations but the concept is not unduly
corrupted by them, and usually only a single appropriate
association is aroused at a time. Furthermore, any arbitrary pair
of concepts can be instantly associated, apparently requiring an
impossibly high degree of neural interconnection. The author
suggests a substitute for the reverberating closed neuronal loop as
an explanation for the engram (active memory trace or working
memory), which may go some way to resolving these difficulties.
Shedding new light on enduring questions, The Autonomous Brain will
be welcomed by a broad audience of behavioral and brain scientists.
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