Search Results

Science is growing at a vertiginous pace. This is no less true of neuroscience than any other discipline. It is no longer possible for anyone either to keep up with relevant literature or fully understand its implications. Ambiguity about what is known, what is uncertain and what has been disproven is especially problematic for research planning. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop strategies and tools to address this growing problem. Engineering the Next Revolution in Neuroscience describes a framework and a set of principles for organizing and simplifying the published record that can be used not only to understand the implications of published data, but also to inform research decisions. The authors use studies of learning and memory to illustrate how the framework and principles introduced were derived from implicit and explicit research practices in neuroscience. The authors then describe how these principles and framework can be used to generate maps of experimental research. This book shows how, armed with these research maps, scientists can determine more efficiently what their fields have accomplished, and where the unexplored territories still reside. The authors argue that the technology to automate the generation of these maps is at hand and that these maps will have a transformative, revolutionary impact on science.

Sports are as varied as the people who play them. We run, jump, and swim. We kick, hit, and shoot balls. We ride sleds in the snow and surf in the sea. From the Olympians of ancient Greece to today’s professional athletes, from adult pickup soccer games to children’s gymnastics classes, people at all levels of ability at all times and in all places have engaged in sport. What drives this phenomenon? In Sport, the neuroscientist Jay Schulkin argues that biology and culture do more than coexist when we play sports—they blend together seamlessly, propelling each other toward greater physical and intellectual achievement. To support this claim, Schulkin discusses history, literature, and art—and engages philosophical inquiry and recent behavioral research. He connects sport’s basic neural requirements, including spatial and temporal awareness, inference, memory, agency, direction, competitive spirit, and endurance, to the demands of other human activities. He affirms sport’s natural role as a creative evolutionary catalyst, turning the external play of sports inward and bringing insight to the diversion that defines our species. Sport, we learn, is a fundamental part of human life.

Warren S. McCulloch (1898-1969) has become an icon of the American cybernetics movement and of current work in the cognitive neurosciences. Much of this legacy stems from his classic 1943 work with Walter Pitts on the logic of neural networks, and from his colourful role as chairman of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953). This biographical work looks beyond McCulloch’s iconic status by exploring the varied scientific, personal, and institutional contexts of McCulloch’s life. By doing so, the book presents McCulloch as a transdisciplinary investigator who took on many scientific identities beyond that of a cybernetician: scientific philosopher, neurophysiologist, psychiatrist, poet, mentor-collaborator, and engineer, and finally, his public persona towards the end of his life, the rebel genius. The book argues that these identities were neither products of McCulloch’s own will nor were they simply shaped by his institutional contexts. In integrating context and agency, the book as provides a more nuanced and rich understanding of McCulloch’s role in the history of American science as well as the institutional contexts of scientific investigations of the brain and mind: in particular at Yale University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book argues that one of McCulloch’s most important contributions was opening up new ways of understanding the brain: no longer simply an object of medical investigation, the brain became the centre of the multidisciplinary neurosciences.

Religions and mythologies from around the world teach that God or gods created humans. Atheist, humanist, and materialist critics, meanwhile, have attempted to turn theology on its head, claiming that religion is a human invention. In this book, E. Fuller Torrey draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to propose a startling answer to the ultimate question. Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods locates the origin of gods within the human brain, arguing that religious belief is a by-product of evolution. Based on an idea originally proposed by Charles Darwin, Torrey marshals evidence that the emergence of gods was an incidental consequence of several evolutionary factors. Using data ranging from ancient skulls and artifacts to brain imaging, primatology, and child development studies, this book traces how new cognitive abilities gave rise to new behaviors. For instance, autobiographical memory, the ability to project ourselves backward and forward in time, gave Homo sapiens a competitive advantage. However, it also led to comprehension of mortality, spurring belief in an alternative to death. Torrey details the neurobiological sequence that explains why the gods appeared when they did, connecting archaeological findings including clothing, art, farming, and urbanization to cognitive developments. This book does not dismiss belief but rather presents religious belief as an inevitable outcome of brain evolution. Providing clear and accessible explanations of evolutionary neuroscience, Evolving Brains, Emerging Gods will shed new light on the mechanics of our deepest mysteries.

Our drive to consume—our desire for food, clothing, smart phones, and megahomes—evolved from our ancestors’ drive to survive. But the psychological and neural processes that originally evolved to guide mammals toward resources that are necessary but scarce may mislead us in modern conditions of material abundance. Such phenomena as obesity, financial bubbles, hoarding, and shopping sprees suggest a mismatch between our instinct to consume and our current environment. This volume brings together research from psychology, neuroscience, economics, marketing, animal behavior, and evolution to explore the causes and consequences of consumption. Contributors consider such topics as how animal food-storing informs human consumption; the downside of evolved “fast and frugal” rules for eating; how future discounting and the draw toward immediate rewards influence food consumption, addiction, and our ability to save; overconsumption as social display; and the policy implications of consumption science.Taken together, the chapters make the case for an emerging interdisciplinary science of consumption that reflects commonalities across species, domains, and fields of inquiry. By carefully comparing mechanisms that underlie seemingly disparate outcomes, we can achieve a unified understanding of consumption that could benefit both science and society

In this book, I take the position that the self is not a “thing” easily reduced to an object of scientific analysis. Rather, the self consists in a multiplicity of aspects, some of which have a neuro-cognitive basis (and thus are amenable to scientific inquiry) while other aspects are best construed as first-person subjectivity, lacking material instantiation. As a consequence of their potential immateriality, the subjective aspect of self cannot be taken as an object and therefore is not easily amenable to treatment by current scientific methods. I argue that to fully appreciate the self, its two aspects must be acknowledged, since it is only in virtue of their interaction that the self of everyday experience becomes a phenomenological reality. However, given their different metaphysical commitments (i.e., material and immaterial aspects of reality), a number of issues must be addressed. These include, but are not limited to, the possibility of interaction between metaphysically distinct aspects of reality, questions of causal closure under the physical, the principle of energy conservation, and more. After addressing these concerns, I present evidence based on self-reports from case studies of individuals who suffer from a chronic or temporary loss of their sense of personal ownership of their mental states. Drawing on this evidence, I argue that personal ownership may be the factor that closes the metaphysical gap between the material and immaterial selves, linking these two disparate aspects of reality, thereby enabling us to experience a unified sense of self despite its underlying multiplicity.

Recent accounts of cognition attempt to overcome the limitations of traditional cognitive science by reconceiving cognition as enactive and the cognizer as an embodied being who is embedded in biological, psychological, and cultural contexts. Cultural forms of sense-making constitute the shared world, which in turn is the origin and place of cognition. This volume is the first interdisciplinary collection on the cultural context of embodiment, offering perspectives from the neurophilosophical to the anthropological. The contributors explore conceptual foundations, drawing on work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, and respond to recent critiques. They consider whether there is something in the self that precedes intersubjectivity and inquire into the relation between culture and consciousness, the nature of shared meaning and social understanding, the social dimension of shame, and the nature of joint affordances. They apply the notion of radical enactive cognition to evolutionary anthropology, and examine the concept of the body in relation to culture in light of studies in such fields as phenomenology, cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and psychopathology. The book covers the interplay of embodiment, enaction, and culture. Contributors Mark Bickhard, Ingar Brinck, Anna Ciaunica, Hanne De Jaegher, Nicolas de Warren, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Christoph Durt, John Z. Elias, Joerg Fingerhut, Aikaterini Fotopoulou, Thomas Fuchs, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Duilio Garofoli, Katrin Heimann, Peter Henningsen, Daniel D. Hutto, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Alba Montes Sánchez, Dermot Moran, Maxwell J. D. Ramstead, Matthew Ratcliffe, Vasudevi Reddy, Zuzanna Rucińska, Alessandro Salice, Glenda Satne, Heribert Sattel, Christian Tewes, Dan Zahavi

After the humanism/anti-humanism debates of the 1940s and ’50s, and after the ‘death of man’ in the linguistic philosophy of the late twentieth-century, French philosophy today is laying fresh claim to the human. This is not to be mistaken for a return to previous ideas of the human, nor is it posthumanism, strictly speaking. It is a series of fundamentally independent and yet strikingly simultaneous initiatives arising in the writing of diverse French thinkers to transform and rework the figure of the human. This book brings together these new figures of the human for the first time, offering the a critique of this contemporary trend in terms of the three categories: the human as ‘capacity’ (Badiou and Meillassoux), as ‘substance’ (Malabou) and as ‘relation’ (Serres and Latour). Tracing these varied transformations of the human makes visible for the first time one of the most widespread, surprising and potentially transformative trends in contemporary French thought. This book draws out both the promises and perils inherent in today’s attempts to rethink humanity’s relation to “nature” and “culture”, to the objects that surround us, to the possibility of social and political change, to ecology and to our own brains, arguing that the stakes of this project are high for our technologically advanced but socially atomised and ecologically vulnerable world.

Since the 1990s, the English-speaking world has seen the rise of a neuroculture derived from neurology and neuroscience. The Neurologists is a book that asks how did we arrive at this moment? What is it about neurology and neuroscience that makes neuroculture seem self-evident? To tell this story The Neurologists charts a chronological course from the time of the French Revolution to after the ‘Decade of the Brain’ that outlines the rise of medical and scientific neurology and the emergence of neuroculture. With its focus chiefly on Great Britain, arguably the place where it all began, The Neurologists describes how Victorian physicians located in a medical culture that privileged general knowledge over narrow specialism came to be transformed into the specialized physicians now called neurologists. The Neurologists therefore recasts the received history of neurology and the history of professions and specialties. It provides new insights into the social, cultural, and institutional practices of British medical and scientific culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Delving into how and why physicians and scientists were interested in nerves, the nervous system, the brain, and the psyche, The Neurologists explores how Renaissance-styled men and women of medicine and science made neurology the medical field seemingly most concerned by the ‘philosophical status of man.’

Contrary to popular rumor, brain science has not shown that souls are an illusion – not if by soul we mean what it is about a person that acts and thinks, often creatively, what makes choices and takes responsibility. The human self, as theories of emergence and complexity are teaching us, is among those complex realities not reducible to the sum of their humbler parts and predecessors. Neuropsychology and cognitive science make a powerful case for the soul, not as a wisp of smoke but as a dynamic reality emergent from our bodily capabilities. Examining perception, consciousness, memory, agency, and creativity Goodman and Caramenico argue for a new humanism rooted in the philosophical and intellectual traditions of the West – and the East – but anchored in the latest scientific findings. Coming to Mind does not pit soul against body or body against soul, as though the work of understanding were a zero-sum game. They argue not for a separable soul, spiritual in name yet mysteriously able to pass through walls. Rather, they lay out a groundwork for understanding the intimate relation between the body (above all, the brain) and an integrated self capable of language and thought, discovery, caring, and love.

Although science has made considerable progress in discovering the neural basis of cognition, how consciousness arises remains elusive. In this book, Pennartz analyzes which aspects of conscious experience can be peeled away to access its core: the relationship between brain processes and the qualitative nature of consciousness. Pennartz traces the problem back to its historical foundations and connects early ideas to contemporary computational neuroscience. What can we learn from neural network models, and where do they fall short in bridging the gap between neurons and conscious experiences? How can neural models of cognition help us define requirements for conscious processing in the brain? These questions underlie Pennartz’s examination of the brain’s anatomy and neurophysiology. This analysis is not limited to visual perception but broadened to include other sensory modalities and their integration. Formulating a representational theory, Pennartz outlines properties that complex neural structures must express to process information consciously. This theoretical framework is constructed using empirical findings from neuroscience and from theoretical arguments such as the ‘Cuneiform Room’ and the ‘Wall Street Banker’. Positing that qualitative experience is a multimodal and multilevel phenomenon at its roots, Pennartz places this body of theory in the wider context of mind-brain philosophy.

Bio-Aesthetics. A Critique examines the rising influence of evolutionary theory across academic disciplines today. Empowered by neo-Darwinian theory and recent advances in neuroscientific research, nascent academic fields have particularly challenged the Humanities’ non-empirical and largely speculative approach to modern art, culture, and aesthetic theory. In its stead, evolutionary scholars advocate a strict biological functionalism that effectively reduces mind to brain and art to science. Unfortunately, Humanities’ scholars so far have been slow to respond to this challenge. Bio-Aesthetics remedies this problem by providing the first comprehensive account of current evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to art and human culture to demonstrate both the need for and the limits of interdisciplinary research in the Humanities. Above all, Bio-Aesthetics is A Critique in the Kantian sense of the term: it works through a critical appraisal of neo-Darwinian reductionism in order to develop a more germane and balanced methodology for future collaborative research across disciplines. Bio-Aesthetics central argument contends that Kant’s transcendentalism amounts to the “structural coupling” of organism and environment, which also applies to our knowledge of the (phenomenological) world we come to inhabit as living beings. Scientific reductionism and neo-Darwinian theory ignore the self-constructed nature of reason and culture for genetic laws and evolutionary principles that allegedly determine human behaviour. Hence the overriding goal of Bio-Aesthetics is to provide the Humanities with a self-critical, historically nuanced and epistemologically up-to-date counter-paradigm to what E. O Wilson called “sociobiology,” that is the reductionist view of human cultural evolution dominant in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory today.

Embodiment—defined as having, being in, or being associated with a body—is a feature of the existence of many entities, perhaps even of all entities. Why entities should find themselves in this condition is the central concern of the present volume. The problem includes, but also goes beyond, the philosophical problem of body: that is, what the essence of a body is, and how, if at all, it differs from matter. On some understandings there may exist bodies, such as stones or asteroids, that are not the bodies of any particular subjects. To speak of embodiment by contrast is always to speak of a subject that variously inhabits, or captains, or is coextensive with, or even is imprisoned within, a body. The subject may in the end be identical to, or an emergent product of, the body. That is, a materialist account of embodied subjects may be the correct one. But insofar as there is a philosophical problem of embodiment, the identity of the embodied subject with the body stands in need of an argument and cannot simply be assumed. The reasons, nature, and consequences of the embodiment of subjects as conceived in the long history of philosophy in Europe as well as in the broader Mediterranean region and in South and East Asia, with forays into religion, art, medicine, and other domains of culture, form the focus of these essays. More precisely, the contributors to this volume shine light on a number of questions that have driven reflection on embodiment throughout the history of philosophy. What is the historical and conceptual relationship between the idea of embodiment and the idea of subjecthood? Am I who I am principally in virtue of the fact that I have the body I have? Relatedly, what is the relationship of embodiment to being and to individuality? Is embodiment a necessary condition of being? Of being an individual? What are the theological dimensions of embodiment? To what extent has the concept of embodiment been deployed in the history of philosophy to contrast the created world with the state of existence enjoyed by God? What are the normative dimensions of theories of embodiment? To what extent is the problem of embodiment a distinctly western preoccupation? Is it the result of a particular local and contingent history, or does it impose itself as a universal problem, wherever and whenever human beings begin to reflect on the conditions of their existence? Ultimately, to what extent can natural science help us to resolve philosophical questions about embodiment, many of which are vastly older than the particular scientific research programs we now believe to hold the greatest promise for revealing to us the bodily basis, or the ultimate physical causes, of who we really are?