This book explains in layperson's terms a new approach to studying consciousness based on a partnership between neuroscientists and complexity scientists. The author, a physicist turned neuroscientist, outlines essential features of this partnership. The new science goes well beyond traditional cognitive science and simple neural networks, which are often the focus in artificial intelligence research. It involves many fields including neuroscience, artificial intelligence, physics, cognitive science, and psychiatry. What causes autism, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer's disease? How does our unconscious influence our actions? As the author shows, these important questions can be viewed in a new light when neuroscientists and complexity scientists work together. This cross-disciplinary approach also offers fresh insights into the major unsolved challenge of our age: the origin of self-awareness. Do minds emerge from brains? Or is something more involved? Using human social networks as a metaphor, the author explains how brain behavior can be compared with the collective behavior of large-scale global systems. Emergent global systems that interact and form relationships with lower levels of organization and the surrounding environment provide useful models for complex brain functions.By blending lucid explanations with illuminating analogies, this book offers the general reader a window into the latest exciting developments in brain research.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is practiced by neurologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and others interested in functional brain imaging. Whether for clinical or experimental purposes, all studies share a common purpose-to relate scalp potentials to the underlying neurophysiology. Electrical potentials on the scalp exhibit spatial and temporal patterns that depend on the nature and location of the sources and the way that currents and fields spread through tissue. Because these dynamic patterns are correlated with behavior and cognition, EEG provides a "window on the mind," correlating physiology and psychology.
This classic and widely acclaimed text, originally published in 1981, filled the large gap between EEG and the physical sciences. It has now been brought completely up to date and will again serve as an invaluable resource for understanding the principles of electric fields in living tissue and for using hard science to study human consciousness and cognition. No comparable volume exists for it is no easy task to explain the problems of EEG in clear language, with mathematics presented mainly in appendices. Among the many topics covered by the Second Edition are micro and meso (intermediate scale) synaptic sources, electrode placement, choice of reference, volume conduction, power and coherence measures, projection of scalp potentials to dura surface, dynamic signatures of conscious experience, neural networks immersed in global fields of synaptic action, and physiological bases for brain source dynamics. The Second Edition is an invaluable resource for neurologists, neuroscientists (especially cognitive neuroscientists), biomedical engineers, and their students andtrainees. It will also appeal to physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, psychiatrists, and industrial engineers interested in EEG.