Species with Amnesia


Book Description

Highly advanced civilizations have been here before us, just to be destroyed by some great global catastrophe. But for each race that has died out, another has taken its place, with a selected few holding on to the memories and sacred knowledge of the past race. In our vanity we think we have discovered some of the great truths of science and technology, but we are in fact only just beginning to rediscover the profound wisdom of past civilizations. In many ways, we are like an awakening Species with Amnesia, yearning to reclaim our forgotten past.




Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System


Book Description

In this sweeping synthesis, Neal J. Cohen and Howard Eichenbaum bring together converging findings from neuropsychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science that provide the critical clues and constraints for developing a more comprehensive understanding of memory. Specifically, they offer a cognitive neuroscience theory of memory that accounts for the nature of memory impairment exhibited in human amnesia and animal models of amnesia, that specifies the functional role played by the hippocampal system in memory, and that provides further understanding of the componential structure of memory.The authors' central thesis is that the hippocampal system mediates a capacity for declarative memory, the kind of memory that in humans supports conscious recollection and the explicit and flexible expression of memories. They argue that this capacity emerges from a representation of critical relations among items in memory, and that such a relational representation supports the ability to make inferences and generalizations from memory, and to manipulate and flexibly express memory in countless ways. In articulating such a description of the fundamental nature of declarative representation and of the mnemonic capabilities to which it gives rise, the authors' theory constitutes a major extension and elaboration of the earlier procedural-declarative account of memory.Support for this view is taken from a variety of experimental studies of amnesia in humans, nonhuman primates, and rodents. Additional support is drawn from observations concerning the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the hippocampal system. The data taken from divergent literatures are shown to converge on the central theme of hippocampal involvement in declarative memory across species and across behavioral paradigms.




Gods with Amnesia


Book Description

The idea that our planet consists of a hollow, or honeycombed, interior is not new. Some of the oldest cultures speak of civilizations inside of vast cavern-cities, within the bowels of the earth. According to certain Buddhist and Hindu traditions, secret tunnels connect Tibet with a subterranean paradise, and they call this legendary underworld Agartha. In India, this underground oasis is best known by its Sanskrit name, Shambhala, thought to mean 'place of tranquility.' Mythologies throughout the world, from South America to the Arctic, describe numerous entrances to these fabled inner kingdoms. Many occult organizations, esoteric authors, and secret societies concur with these myths and legends of subterranean inhabitants, who are the remnants of antediluvian civilizations, which sought refuge in hollow caverns inside the earth.Assuming that the myths are true, and the Earth is partially hollow, how could life survive underground? How would organisms receive the ventilation required to breathe miles below the surface? What would provide the light needed to see, or to cause the photosynthesis necessary for the plant life that allegedly exists in these inner worlds? Are there any known sources of sustenance available that could provide for a large human population? What evidence is there that a sustainable biosphere could exist miles below the surface, totally isolated from the nourishment and the established life cycle provided by the sun? Where are the entrances to inner earth, and which races live there?Author and anthropologist, Robert Sepehr, explores these questions and attempts to unlock their riddles, which have eluded any serious consideration in mainstream academia. Numerous endevours have been undertaken to access the interior of the earth. Polar expeditions and battles, such as Operation Highjump, still remain largely classified, and have been shrouded in secrecy for decades, but scientific revelations validating the rumors surrounding these covert events, and their implications, are finally being exposed to daylight. What are the mysteries of inner Earth?




The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain


Book Description

"A work of enormous breadth, likely to pleasantly surprise both general readers and experts."—New York Times Book Review This revolutionary book provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness. Drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the co-evolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions. Informing these insights is a new understanding of how Darwinian processes underlie the brain's development and function as well as its evolution. In contrast to much contemporary neuroscience that treats the brain as no more or less than a computer, Deacon provides a new clarity of vision into the mechanism of mind. It injects a renewed sense of adventure into the experience of being human.




Wild Ones


Book Description

"Intelligent and highly nuanced… This book may bring tears to your eyes." -- San Francisco Chronicle Journalist Jon Mooallem has watched his little daughter’s world overflow with animals butterfly pajamas, appliquéd owls—while the actual world she’s inheriting slides into a great storm of extinction. Half of all species could disappear by the end of the century, and scientists now concede that most of America’s endangered animals will survive only if conservationists keep rigging the world around them in their favor. So Mooallem ventures into the field, often taking his daughter with him, to move beyond childlike fascination and make those creatures feel more real. Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America that inflects it—from Thomas Jefferson’s celebrations of early abundance to the turn-of the-last-century origins of the teddy bear to the whale-loving hippies of the 1970s. With propulsive curiosity and searing wit, and without the easy moralizing and nature worship of environmental journalism’s older guard, Wild Ones merges reportage, science, and history into a humane and endearing meditation on what it means to live in, and bring a life into, a broken world.




Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet


Book Description

Living on a damaged planet challenges who we are and where we live. This timely anthology calls on twenty eminent humanists and scientists to revitalize curiosity, observation, and transdisciplinary conversation about life on earth. As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.” Included are essays by scholars in anthropology, ecology, science studies, art, literature, and bioinformatics who posit critical and creative tools for collaborative survival in a more-than-human Anthropocene. The essays are organized around two key figures that also serve as the publication’s two openings: Ghosts, or landscapes haunted by the violences of modernity; and Monsters, or interspecies and intraspecies sociality. Ghosts and Monsters are tentacular, windy, and arboreal arts that invite readers to encounter ants, lichen, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste—in short, the wonders and terrors of an unintended epoch. Contributors: Karen Barad, U of California, Santa Cruz; Kate Brown, U of Maryland, Baltimore; Carla Freccero, U of California, Santa Cruz; Peter Funch, Aarhus U; Scott F. Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Deborah M. Gordon, Stanford U; Donna J. Haraway, U of California, Santa Cruz; Andreas Hejnol, U of Bergen, Norway; Ursula K. Le Guin; Marianne Elisabeth Lien, U of Oslo; Andrew Mathews, U of California, Santa Cruz; Margaret McFall-Ngai, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Ingrid M. Parker, U of California, Santa Cruz; Mary Louise Pratt, NYU; Anne Pringle, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Deborah Bird Rose, U of New South Wales, Sydney; Dorion Sagan; Lesley Stern, U of California, San Diego; Jens-Christian Svenning, Aarhus U.




Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction


Book Description

Winner of the Sierra Club's 2021 Rachel Carson Award One of Chicago Tribune's Ten Best Books of 2021 Named a Top Ten Best Science Book of 2021 by Booklist and Smithsonian Magazine "At once thoughtful and thought-provoking,” Beloved Beasts tells the story of the modern conservation movement through the lives and ideas of the people who built it, making “a crucial addition to the literature of our troubled time" (Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction). In the late nineteenth century, humans came at long last to a devastating realization: their rapidly industrializing and globalizing societies were driving scores of animal species to extinction. In Beloved Beasts, acclaimed science journalist Michelle Nijhuis traces the history of the movement to protect and conserve other forms of life. From early battles to save charismatic species such as the American bison and bald eagle to today’s global effort to defend life on a larger scale, Nijhuis’s “spirited and engaging” account documents “the changes of heart that changed history” (Dan Cryer, Boston Globe). With “urgency, passion, and wit” (Michael Berry, Christian Science Monitor), she describes the vital role of scientists and activists such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, reveals the origins of vital organizations like the Audubon Society and the World Wildlife Fund, explores current efforts to protect species such as the whooping crane and the black rhinoceros, and confronts the darker side of modern conservation, long shadowed by racism and colonialism. As the destruction of other species continues and the effects of climate change wreak havoc on our world, Beloved Beasts charts the ways conservation is becoming a movement for the protection of all species including our own.




1666 Redemption Through Sin


Book Description

In 1666, a man by the name of Sabbatai Zevi declared himself to be the Messiah. Followers of his heretical cult believed that sin is holy and should be practised for its own sake. Sabbateans and their successors, the Frankists, have indulged in religious orgies, ritual sacrifice, incest, adultery and homosexuality for 350 years. Using secret societies such as the Masons, this diabolical sect has infultrated into the highest echelons of political power. They covertly rule as the unelected hidden hand shaping history behind a veil of conspiracy.




Amnesia


Book Description

The ADRSTA Chronicles, a hybrid series for those who like stories about magic and fantasy but also love the intrigue of sci-fi with exciting intergalactic tales. A discerning reader's "romance, sci-fi, and fantasy" pick. Spaceships, frightening aliens, magical creatures, realms of fantasy and sorcery, and lots of love and simmering sex too!




Amnesia


Book Description

Adventure fiction. Graphic Novel. The detonation of a powerful electromagnetic pulse could render power circuits useless - but what if a weapon was discharged that erased people's memories? 'Amnesia' explores what might happen if someone were to push the restart button on the human race. One of the most feared terror attack scenarios involves the detonation of a weapon that generates a powerful electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that immediately renders power circuits, computers, even automobiles useless. But what if a weapon was discharged that, in addition to all the above, also erased people's memories? Would mankind, given a fresh start, continue on its path to self-destruction? Or would it, free of its preconceptions, usher in a new age of peace? Amnesia explores what might happen if someone were to push the restart button on the human race.