The Integrated Mind


Book Description

In this book we are trying to illuminate the persistent and nag ging questions of how mind, life, and the essence of being relate to brain mechanisms. We do that not because we have a commit ment to bear witness to the boring issue of reductionism but be cause we want to know more about what it's all about. How, in deed, does the brain work? How does it allow us to love, hate, see, cry, suffer, and ultimately understand Kepler's laws? We try to uncover clues to these staggering questions by con sidering the results of our studies on the bisected brain. Several years back, one of us wrote a book with that title, and the ap proach was to describe how brain and behavior are affected when one takes the brain apart. In the present book, we are ready to put it back together, and go beyond, for we feel that split-brain studies are now at the point of contributing to an understanding of the workings of the integrated mind. We are grateful to Dr. Donald Wilson of the Dartmouth Medi cal School for allowing us to test his patients. We would also like to thank our past and present colleagues, including Richard Naka mura, Gail Risse, Pamela Greenwood, Andy Francis, Andrea El berger, Nick Brecha, Lynn Bengston, and Sally Springer, who have been involved in various facets of the experimental studies on the bisected brain described in this book.







Lateralization in the Nervous system


Book Description

Lateralization in the Nervous System reviews various aspects of lateralization in the nervous system, with emphasis on approaches such as the investigation of turning tendencies and electrocortical indices of hemispheric asymmetry. Experimental paradigms and outcomes that are applicable to both human and nonhuman species are highlighted. This book is comprised of 26 chapters and begins with an overview of functional lateralization in nonhuman species such as monkeys. Brain asymmetry is examined in context with other biological asymmetries in the quest for general mechanisms and principles of lateralization. The problem of inheritance, embryology, and development of asymmetry is also discussed from a variety of environmentalist and nativist perspectives. Highly suggestive invertebrate and avian models for lateralization are presented, along with the evidence for cerebral dominance and handedness in nonhuman species. Human clinical neuropsychological findings, such as the effects of unilateral cortical and thalamic lesions and the syndrome of unilateral neglect, are considered, together with asymmetries in perception and attention. This monograph will be of interest to psychologists (physiological, cognitive, developmental, and clinical), behavioral biologists, neuroscientists, neurologists, and psychiatrists, as well as to scholars and educators from the humanities and social sciences who are concerned with the nature and biological bases of left-right differences in brain, behavior, and thinking.







Philosophical Dimensions of the Neuro-Medical Sciences


Book Description

Although the investigation and regulation of the faculties of the human mind appear to be the proper and sole concern of philosophers, you see that they are in some part nevertheless so little foreign to the medical forum that while someone may deny that they are proper to the physician he cannot deny that physicians have the obliga tion to philosophize. Jerome Gaub, De regimine mentis, IV, 10 ([ 10], p. 40) The Second Trans-Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, whose principal theme was 'Philosophical Dimensions of the Neuro-Medical Sciences,' convened at the University of Connecticut Health Center at the invitation of Robert U. Massey, Dean of the School of Medicine, during May 15, 16, and 17, 1975. The Proceedings constitute this volume. At this Symposium we intended to realize sentiments which Sir John Eccles ex pressed as director of a Study Week of the Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, CiWl del Vaticano, in the fall of 1964: "Certainly when one comes to a [study] . . . devoted to brain and mind it is not possible to exclude relations with philosophy" ([5], p. viii). During that study week in 1964, a group of distinguished biomedical and behavioral scientists met under the director ship of Sir John C. Eccles to relate psychology to what Sir John called 'the Neurosciences. ' The purpose of that study week was to treat issues con cerning the functions of the brain and, in particular, to concentrate upon the relations between brain functions and consciousness.




Encyclopedia of Child Behavior and Development


Book Description

This reference work breaks new ground as an electronic resource. Utterly comprehensive, it serves as a repository of knowledge in the field as well as a frequently updated conduit of new material long before it finds its way into standard textbooks.




The Brain and Behavior


Book Description

New edition building on the success of previous one. Retains core aim of providing an accessible introduction to behavioral neuroanatomy.










Selected Papers on Language and the Brain


Book Description

Philosophers of science work not only with the methods of the sciences but with their contents as well. Substantive issues concerning the relation between mind and matter, between the material basis and the functions of cognition, have been central within the entire history of philosophy. We recall such philosophers as Aristotle, Descartes, the early Kant, Ernst Mach, and the early William James as directly inquiring of the organs and structures of thinking. Science and its philosophical self-criticism are especially and deeply united in the effort to understand the biological brain and human behavior, and so it requires no apology to include this collection of clinical studies among Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The work of Dr. Norman Geschwind, well represented in this selection, explores the relation between structure and function, between the anatomy of the brain and the 'higher' behavior of men and women. As a clinical neurologist, Geschwind was led to these studies particularly by his in terest in those pathologies which have to do with human perception and language. His research into the anatomical substrates of specific dis orders-and strikingly the aphasias -present a fascinating and provocative examination of fundamental questions which will concern not neurologists alone but also psychologists, physicians, linguists, speech pathologists, educators, anthropologists, historians of medicine, and philosophers, among others, namely all those interested in the characteristic modes of human activity, in speech, in perception, and in the learning process generally.