Author : Giacomo Rizzolatti
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 40,31 MB
Release : 2008
Category : Medical
ISBN : 019921798X
When we witness a great actor, musician, or sportsperson performing, we share something of their experience. It become clear just how this sharing of experience is realised within the human brain. This text provides an accessible overview of mirror neurons, written by the man who first discovered them.
Author : Ahron Friedberg
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 28,11 MB
Release : 2020-12-23
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1000299295
Psychotherapy and Personal Change: Two Minds in a Mirror offers unique day-to-day accounts of patients undergoing psychotherapy and what happens during "talk therapy" to startle the complacent, conscious mind and expose the unconscious. It is a candid, moment-by-moment revelation of how the therapist’s own memories, feelings, and doubts are often as much a factor in the process as those of the patient. In the process of healing, both the therapist and the patient reflect on each other and on themselves. As the therapist develops empathy for the patient, and the patient develops trust in the therapist, their shared memories, feelings, and associations interact and entwine – almost kaleidoscopically – causing each to ask questions of the other and themselves. In this book, Dr. Friedberg reveals personal insights that arose as he recalled memories to share with patients. These insights might not have arisen but for the therapy, which operates in multiple directions as patient and therapist explore the present, the past, and the unknown. Readers will see the therapist – like the patient – as a complex, vulnerable human being influenced by parents, colleagues, and friends, whose conscious and unconscious minds ramify through each other. It is a truism of psychotherapy that in order to commit to the process, whatever the reservations or misconceptions, one must understand that therapy is not passive. The patient must expect to become personally involved with the therapist. The patient learns about the therapist even as the therapist helps the patient to gain insight into him- or herself. Psychotherapy and Personal Change shows how this exchange develops and how each actor is affected. Through specific examples, the book raises the reader’s understanding of what to expect from psychotherapy and enhances his/her insight into therapy that he or she may have had already.
Author : Geoffrey Bullough
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 364 pages
File Size : 29,17 MB
Release : 1962-12-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1442651075
The aim of the author, who has long been interested in the history of ideas, has been to give some illustrations of the ways in which at various periods English poetry has reflected current views of the human mind, with special reference to such topics as its place in the cosmos, its relations with the body, the connections between sense, passions, and reason, the problem of soul and its possible survival after death. The subject matter is important, for many of the more self-conscious writers have been profoundly affected by their assumptions about the senses and passions, the reason and the imagination. The author traces four main historical phases in each of which different aspects and potentialities of the mind have been stressed. Chapter I discusses the microcosmic conception of man inherited from the Middle Ages and traces its influence in some allegorical and didactic verse, lyric and epic. Chapter II considers the development of Shakespeare’s attitude to the mind and human character. Chapter III turns to some effects (between Dryden and Wordsworth) of the seventeenth-century revolution in philosophy and science, including the search for clarity and order, the Augustan interest in reason and the passions, and the rise of the association of psychology. Chapter IV shows how the Romantic poets made use of associations and intuitions, and discusses the Victorian poets’ hopes and fears about immortality in relation to the advance of science. The last chapter traces the influence of the philosophy of the “moment” from the aesthetes to T.S. Eliot, and distinguishes the effects of some twentieth-century psychologies in modern poetry. Poets, of course, have rarely been systematic philosophers or psychologists; they have usually picked out and applied imaginatively only a few notions from contemporary thought. Consequently this study does not attempt to set the history of English poetry squarely against the history of philosophy. Rather, characteristic topics and writers have been selected and the discussion of them will be seen to throw light on some major imaginative preoccupations of each age. The student of English poetry and the history of ideas will find valuable comments on the major writers from Chaucer and Spenser down through Shakespeare and Milton, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy and on a variety of modern poets such as Bridges, Eliot, Sitwell, Auden, and Graces. Alexander Lecture Series.
Author : Wolfgang Prinz
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 36,11 MB
Release : 2012-03-16
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 026230094X
A novel proposal that the cognitive architecture for volition and cognition arises from particular kinds of social interaction and communication. In Open Minds, Wolfgang Prinz offers the novel claim that agency and intentionality are first perceived and understood in others, and that it is only through practices and discourses of social mirroring that individuals come to apply these features to themselves and to shape their architectures for volition and cognition accordingly. Developing a (social science) constructive approach within a (cognitive science) representational framework, Prinz argues that the architectures for agency (volition) and intentionality (cognition) arise from particular kinds of social interaction and communication. Rather than working as closed, individual systems, our minds operate in ways that are fundamentally open to other minds. Prinz describes mirror systems and mirror games, particular kinds of representational mechanisms and social games that provide tools for aligning closed individual minds with other minds. He maps the formation of an architecture for volition, addressing issues of agency and intention-based top-down control, then outlines the ways the same basic ideas can be applied to an architecture for cognition, helping to solve basic issues of subjectivity and intentionality. Addressing the reality and efficacy of such social artifacts as autonomy and free will, Prinz contends that our beliefs about minds are not just beliefs about their workings but powerful tools for making them work as we believe. It is through our beliefs that our minds work in a particular way that we actually make them work in that way.
Author : R. Tierney-Hynes
Publisher : Springer
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 10,93 MB
Release : 2015-12-11
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1137033290
Eighteenth-century philosophy owes much to the early novel. Using the figure of the romance reader this book tells a new story of eighteenth-century reading. The impressionable mind and mutable identity of the romance reader haunt eighteenth-century definitions of the self, and the seductions of fiction insist on making an appearance in philosophy.
Author : Mark Turner
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 311 pages
File Size : 46,37 MB
Release : 2021-03-09
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0691227780
The great adventure of modern cognitive science, the discovery of the human mind, will fundamentally revise our concept of what it means to be human. Drawing together the classical conception of the language arts, the Renaissance sense of scientific discovery, and the modern study of the mind, Mark Turner offers a vision of the central role that language and the arts of language can play in that adventure.
Author : Carlos Basualdo
Publisher : Whitney Museum of American Art
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 27,2 MB
Release : 2021
Category : Art
ISBN : 9780300254259
"This lavishly illustrated retrospective of Jasper Johns's work offers a new perspective on the artist's work based on his own enduring fascination with mirroring and doubles"--
Author : Giacomo Rizzolatti
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 34,12 MB
Release : 2007-11-22
Category : Science
ISBN : 0191030805
Emotions and actions are powerfully contagious; when we see someone laugh, cry, show disgust, or experience pain, in some sense, we share that emotion. When we see someone in distress, we share that distress. When we see a great actor, musician or sportsperson perform at the peak of their abilities, it can feel like we are experiencing just something of what they are experiencing. Yet only recently, with the discover of mirror neurons, has it become clear just how this powerfulsharing of experience is realised within the human brain. This book provides, for the first time, a systematic overview of mirror neurons, written by the man who first discovered them.In the early 1990's Giacomo Rizzolatti and his co-workers at the University of Parma discovered that some neurons had a surprising property. They responded not only when a subject performed a given action, but also when the subject oberved someone else performing that same action. These results had a deep impact on cognitive neuroscience, leading the neuroscientist VS Ramachandran to predict that 'mirror neurons would do for psychology what DNA did for biology'. The unexpected properties ofthese neurons have not only attracted the attention of neuroscientists. Many sociologists, anthropologists, and even artists have been fascinated by mirror neurons. The director and playwright Peter Brook stated that mirror neurons throw new light on the mysterious link that is created each time actorstake the stage and face their audience - the sight of a great actor performing activates in the brain of the observer the very same areas that are active in the performer - including both their actions and their emotions.Written in a highly accessible style, that conveys something of the excitement of this groundbreaking theory, Mirrors in the brain is the definitive account of one the major scientific discoveries of the past 50 years.
Author : Henry M. Wellman
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 201 pages
File Size : 47,21 MB
Release : 2019-12-03
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 019087869X
The need to understand human social life is basic to our human nature and fuels a life-long quest that we begin in early childhood. Key to this quest is trying to fathom our inner mental states--our hopes, plans, wants, thoughts, and emotions. Scientists deem this developing a "theory of mind." In Reading Minds, Henry Wellman tells the story of our journey into that understanding. Our hard-won, everyday comprehension of people and minds is not spoon-fed or taught. Each of us creates a wide-ranging theory of mind step-by-step and uses it to understand how all people work. Failure to learn these steps cripples a child, and ultimately an adult, in areas as diverse as interacting socially, creating a coherent life story, enjoying drama and movies, and living on one's own. Progressing along these steps--as most of us do--allows us to see the nature of our shared humanity, to understand our children and our childhood selves, to teach and to learn from others, and to better navigate and make sense of our social world. Theory of mind is basic to why some of us become religious believers and others atheists, why some of us become novelists and all of us love stories, why some love scary movies and some hate them. Reading Minds illuminates how we develop this theory of mind as children, how that defines us as individuals, and ultimately how it defines us as human.
Author : Gregory Hickok
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 13,22 MB
Release : 2014-08-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 0393244164
An essential reconsideration of one of the most far-reaching theories in modern neuroscience and psychology. In 1992, a group of neuroscientists from Parma, Italy, reported a new class of brain cells discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. These cells, later dubbed mirror neurons, responded equally well during the monkey’s own motor actions, such as grabbing an object, and while the monkey watched someone else perform similar motor actions. Researchers speculated that the neurons allowed the monkey to understand others by simulating their actions in its own brain. Mirror neurons soon jumped species and took human neuroscience and psychology by storm. In the late 1990s theorists showed how the cells provided an elegantly simple new way to explain the evolution of language, the development of human empathy, and the neural foundation of autism. In the years that followed, a stream of scientific studies implicated mirror neurons in everything from schizophrenia and drug abuse to sexual orientation and contagious yawning. In The Myth of Mirror Neurons, neuroscientist Gregory Hickok reexamines the mirror neuron story and finds that it is built on a tenuous foundation—a pair of codependent assumptions about mirror neuron activity and human understanding. Drawing on a broad range of observations from work on animal behavior, modern neuroimaging, neurological disorders, and more, Hickok argues that the foundational assumptions fall flat in light of the facts. He then explores alternative explanations of mirror neuron function while illuminating crucial questions about human cognition and brain function: Why do humans imitate so prodigiously? How different are the left and right hemispheres of the brain? Why do we have two visual systems? Do we need to be able to talk to understand speech? What’s going wrong in autism? Can humans read minds? The Myth of Mirror Neurons not only delivers an instructive tale about the course of scientific progress—from discovery to theory to revision—but also provides deep insights into the organization and function of the human brain and the nature of communication and cognition.
