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The Naked Neuron

Author : Rhawn Joseph

Publisher : Springer

Page : 440 pages

File Size : 36,55 MB

Release : 2013-12-01

Category : Medical

ISBN : 1489960082

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Book Description

In the beginning there was not only life but the ability to communicate and eventually to cooperate among the most basic, primeval creatures. In The Naked Neuron Dr. Joseph - an internationally respected neuroscientist and author of the highly praised The Right Brain and the Unconscious: Discovering the Stranger Within - takes us on an intriguing journey through time as he traces the evolution of communication and language from the most primitive single-celled animals to our earliest ancestors to humans today. As he so clearly demonstrates, we are linked to all levels of animals in a common bond of sensing, feeling, and communication. Be it singing wolves, dancing bees, or writhing rock and roll dancers, all communicate a treasure chest of meaning in the absence of the spoken word. Approximately 700 million years ago, a unique type of cell came into being - the neuron. This "naked" neuron, or nerve cell, lacked a protective fatty sheath. Still, it marked a monumental and world altering development, since it would become the building block of the brain. The naked neuron generated a revolutionary change resulting in a greater complexity and subtlety of thought. Dr. Joseph vividly depicts how neurons conferred on early humans advanced powers of mental and sensory acuity, including the gift of remembering one's past and contemplating the future. Although humans possess much of the same ancient brain tissue as our fellow primates, Dr. Joseph reveals to us the singular features of the human brain that have enabled humans uniquely to develop complex, spoken language. He holds us spellbound, revealing that although the new and old brain tissue are couched within the same brain, each often has difficulty understanding the impulses and language of the other. This ground-breaking book draws on Dr. Joseph's brilliant and original research and theories, fusing the latest discoveries made in neuroscience, sociobiology, and anthropology. He illuminates how the languages of the body and brain enhance intuitive understanding and spur a thirst for knowledge for its own sake. The human body and brain together are a veritable living museum which contains billions of cells with a long evolutionary history. As this unforgettable book shows, it is the communication of this panoply of cells - the residues of the past merged with the musings of the present - that gives rise to life, love, art, science, literature, and the ceaseless desire to search for and acquire knowledge



The Naked Brain

Author : Richard Restak, M.D.

Publisher : Crown

Page : 274 pages

File Size : 33,78 MB

Release : 2009-01-21

Category : Science

ISBN : 030749697X

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Book Description

Consider a world in which • Marketers use brain scans to determine consumer interest in a product • Politicians use brain-image-based profiles to target voters • A test could determine your suitability for a job or to whom you will be romantically attracted Far from science fiction, this “neurosociety”—a society in which brain science influences every aspect of daily life—is already here. Innovative researchers and cutting-edge technology, like brain imaging and brain scanning devices, have revolutionized our understanding of how we process information, communicate, trust, sympathize, and love. However, scientists and doctors are not the only ones interested in the naked brain; advertisers, politicians, economists, and others are using the latest findings on the human brain to reshape our lives, from the bedroom to the boardroom. Despite the potential benefits, there’s obvious peril in the promise. Richard Restak explores the troubling moral and legal dilemmas that arise from corporate and political applications of this new brain research. Someday we may live in a world where our choices, our professional and personal prospects, even our morals and ethics will be controlled by those armed with an elite understanding of the principles of neuroscience. Eye-opening and provocative, The Naked Brain is a startling look at the impact such unprecedented access to our most secret thoughts and tendencies will have on all of us. In The Naked Brain, bestselling author Richard Restak explores how the latest technology and research have exposed the brain and how we think, feel, remember, and socialize in unprecedented and often surprising ways. Now that knowledge is being used by doctors, advertisers, politicians, and others to influence and revolutionize nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Restak is our guide to this neurosociety, a brave new world in which brain science influences our present and will even more tangibly shape our future. Citing social trends, shifts in popular culture, the rise and fall of products in the public favor, even changes in the American vernacular, The Naked Brain is an illuminating and often troubling investigation of the impending opportunities and dangers being created by the neuroscience revolution, and a revelation for anyone who ever wondered why they prefer Coke over Pepsi or Kerry over Bush. From the Hardcover edition.



The Spike

Author : Mark Humphries

Publisher : Princeton University Press

Page : 232 pages

File Size : 42,49 MB

Release : 2021-03-09

Category : Science

ISBN : 0691213518

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Book Description

The story of a neural impulse and what it reveals about how our brains work We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out. In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions. Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.” Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide. In The Spike, Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction. In vivid language, Humphries tells the story of what happens in our brain, what we know about spikes, and what we still have left to understand about them. Drawing on decades of research in neuroscience, Humphries explores how spikes are born, how they are transmitted, and how they lead us to action. He dives into previously unanswered mysteries: Why are most neurons silent? What causes neurons to fire spikes spontaneously, without input from other neurons or the outside world? Why do most spikes fail to reach any destination? Humphries presents a new vision of the brain, one where fundamental computations are carried out by spontaneous spikes that predict what will happen in the world, helping us to perceive, decide, and react quickly enough for our survival. Traversing neuroscience’s expansive terrain, The Spike follows a single electrical response to illuminate how our extraordinary brains work.



The Beautiful Brain

Author : Larry W. Swanson

Publisher : Abrams

Page : 208 pages

File Size : 24,35 MB

Release : 2017-01-17

Category : Science

ISBN : 1613129947

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Book Description

At the crossroads of art and science, Beautiful Brain presents Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s contributions to neuroscience through his groundbreaking artistic brain imagery. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was the father of modern neuroscience and an exceptional artist. He devoted his life to the anatomy of the brain, the body’s most complex and mysterious organ. His superhuman feats of visualization, based on fanatically precise techniques and countless hours at the microscope, resulted in some of the most remarkable illustrations in the history of science. Beautiful Brain presents a selection of his exquisite drawings of brain cells, brain regions, and neural circuits with accessible descriptive commentary. These drawings are explored from multiple perspectives: Larry W. Swanson describes Cajal’s contributions to neuroscience; Lyndel King and Eric Himmel explore his artistic roots and achievement; Eric A. Newman provides commentary on the drawings; and Janet M. Dubinsky describes contemporary neuroscience imaging techniques. This book is the companion to a traveling exhibition opening at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis in February 2017, marking the first time that many of these works, which are housed at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid, have been seen outside of Spain. Beautiful Brain showcases Cajal’s contributions to neuroscience, explores his artistic roots and achievement, and looks at his work in relation to contemporary neuroscience imaging, appealing to general readers and professionals alike.



Borges and Memory

Author : Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

Publisher : MIT Press

Page : 225 pages

File Size : 36,16 MB

Release : 2023-10-31

Category : Science

ISBN : 0262549565

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Book Description

A scientist's exploration of the working of memory begins with a story by Borges about a man who could not forget. Imagine the astonishment felt by neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga when he found a fantastically precise interpretation of his research findings in a story written by the great Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges fifty years earlier. Quian Quiroga studies the workings of the brain—in particular how memory works—one of the most complex and elusive mysteries of science. He and his fellow neuroscientists have at their disposal sophisticated imaging equipment and access to information not available just twenty years ago. And yet Borges seemed to have imagined the gist of Quian Quiroga's discoveries decades before he made them. The title character of Borges's "Funes the Memorious" remembers everything in excruciatingly particular detail but is unable to grasp abstract ideas. Quian Quiroga found neurons in the human brain that respond to abstract concepts but ignore particular details, and, spurred by the way Borges imagined the consequences of remembering every detail but being incapable of abstraction, he began a search for the origins of Funes. Borges's widow, María Kodama, gave him access to her husband's personal library, and Borges's books led Quian Quiroga to reread earlier thinkers in philosophy and psychology. He found that just as Borges had perhaps dreamed the results of Quian Quiroga's discoveries, other thinkers—William James, Gustav Spiller, John Stuart Mill—had perhaps also dreamed a story like "Funes." With Borges and Memory, Quian Quiroga has given us a fascinating and accessible story about the workings of the brain that the great creator of Funes would appreciate.



The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion

Author : Michael A. Jawer

Publisher : Simon and Schuster

Page : 353 pages

File Size : 31,95 MB

Release : 2009-05-21

Category : Body, Mind & Spirit

ISBN : 1594779759

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Book Description

A cutting-edge examination of feelings, not thoughts, as the gateway to understanding consciousness • Contends that emotion is the greatest influence on personality development • Offers a new perspective on immunity, stress, and psychosomatic conditions • Explains how emotion is key to understanding out-of-body experience, apparitions, and other anomalous perceptions Contemporary science holds that the brain rules the body and generates all our feelings and perceptions. Michael Jawer and Dr. Marc Micozzi disagree. They contend that it is our feelings that underlie our conscious selves and determine what we think and how we conduct our lives. The less consciousness we have of our emotional being, the more physical disturbances we are likely to have--from ailments such as migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and post-traumatic stress to anomalous perceptions such as apparitions and involuntary out-of-body experiences. Using the latest scientific research on immunity, sensation, stress, cognition, and emotional expression, the authors demonstrate that the way we process our feelings provides a key to who is most likely to experience these phenomena and why. They explain that emotion is a portal into the world of extraordinary perception, and they provide the studies that validate the science behind telepathic dreams, poltergeists, and ESP. The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion challenges the prevailing belief that the brain must necessarily rule the body. Far from being by-products of neurochemistry, the authors show that emotions are the key vehicle by which we can understand ourselves and our interactions with the world around us as well as our most intriguing--and perennially baffling--experiences.



Self Comes to Mind

Author : Antonio Damasio

Publisher : Vintage

Page : 385 pages

File Size : 50,7 MB

Release : 2010-11-09

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0307379493

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Book Description

A leading neuroscientist explores with authority, with imagination, and with unparalleled mastery how the brain constructs the mind and how the brain makes that mind conscious. Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years researching and and revealing how the brain works. Here, in his most ambitious and stunning work yet, he rejects the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, and presents compelling new scientific evidence that posits an evolutionary perspective. His view entails a radical change in the way the history of the conscious mind is viewed and told, suggesting that the brain’s development of a human self is a challenge to nature’s indifference. This development helps to open the way for the appearance of culture, perhaps one of our most defining characteristics as thinking and self-aware beings.



Fear Itself

Author : Rush W. Dozier

Publisher : Macmillan + ORM

Page : 374 pages

File Size : 46,65 MB

Release : 2015-12-22

Category : Psychology

ISBN : 125010873X

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Book Description

What are you afraid of? In Fear Itself, Pulitzer-nominated science author Rush W. Dozier, Jr., takes on such challenging questions as: What is fear? Where does it originate? What purpose does it serve? He reveals how our daily lives are shaped by fear, and yet, how it also pushes us to fulfill our greatest potential. Succeeding in making complicated points of modern neuroscience both accessible and fascinating, Dozier takes us on a thriling journey through the science of the brain and the everyday reality of this most human emotion.



The Oscillating Brain

Author : Timothy D. Sheehan M.D.

Publisher : LifeRich Publishing

Page : 158 pages

File Size : 48,19 MB

Release : 2016-01-12

Category : Science

ISBN : 1489705821

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Book Description

The Oscillating Brain explains for the first time how the human brain works. Neural oscillation is a form of repetitive activity which is characteristic of complex systems. The brain has extensive reciprocal connections. Reciprocal connectivity is the basis for neural oscillation. While some patterns of neural oscillation are localized (restricted to specific regions of the brain), others involve reciprocal connections between geographically separate areas of the brain permitting more widespread neural network interaction. Neural network oscillation transforms the brains three-pound mass of grey matter into a dynamic medium. Conscious experience involves the integrated interaction of both sensory and motor areas of the brain. Our experience of reality is the product of brain activity. Reality, as it is constructed by our brain, is an inherently simplified version of the world that enables us to respond rapidly to developing situations in a fashion that promotes survival. Our reality is heavily biased by our emotional reactions. We see the world in terms of good and evil and continually strive for good as a means of enhancing our sense of security. However, differences in our experience of good and evil have been a source of human conflict for as long as mankind has been on this planet. Global information networks and our increasing economic interdependence have made these differences increasingly difficult to ignore. Human striving for an absolute level of certainty and security threatens our day-to-day existence. We must learn to recognize the limitations of the human brain.



Brain, Mind, and the External Signs of Intelligence (Psychology Revivals)

Author : Bernard Hollander

Publisher : Routledge

Page : 220 pages

File Size : 50,89 MB

Release : 2015-07-16

Category : Psychology

ISBN : 1317554000

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Book Description

Born in Vienna in 1864, Bernard Hollander was a London-based psychiatrist. He is best known for being one of the main proponents of phrenology. This title originally published in 1931 looks at the different regions of the brain and their various functions in relation to intelligence. From the preface: "The records of cases collected by the author, including some of his own, point to there being at least three main regions of totally different functions.... Of these three regions, the frontal is by far the largest in man and the most important, being the region for the manifestation of the highest intellectual abilities." Back in print this is a chance to read all about the study of the brain, mind and external signs of intelligence from the early twentieth century.