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The genius within : unlocking your brain's potential
\"David Adam explores the groundbreaking neuroscience of cognitive enhancement that is changing the way the brain and the mind works--to make it better, sharper, more focused and, yes, more intelligent. He considers how we measure and judge intelligence, taking us on a fascinating tour of the history of brain science and medicine, from gentlemen scientist brain autopsy clubs to case studies of mental health patients with extraordinary savant abilities. In addition to reporting on the latest research and fascinating case studies, David also goes on his own personal journey to investigate the possibilities of neuroenhancement, using himself as a guinea pig for smart pills and electrical brain stimulation in order to improve his IQ scores and cheat his way into MENSA. Getting to the heart of how we think about intelligence and mental ability, The Genius Within plunges into deep ethical, neuroscientific, and historical pools of enquiry about the science of brain function, untapping potential, and what it means for all of us. Going to the heart of how we consider, measure, and judge mental ability, The Genius Within asks difficult questions about the science that could rank and define us, and inevitably shape our future.\"--Jacket.
Book
After Phrenology
The computer analogy of the mind has been as widely adopted in contemporary cognitive neuroscience as was the analogy of the brain as a collection of organs in phrenology. Just as the phrenologist would insist that each organ must have its particular function, so contemporary cognitive neuroscience is committed to the notion that each brain region must have its fundamental computation. InAfter Phrenology, Michael Anderson argues that to achieve a fully post-phrenological science of the brain, we need to reassess this commitment and devise an alternate, neuroscientifically grounded taxonomy of mental function. Anderson contends that the cognitive roles played by each region of the brain are highly various, reflecting different neural partnerships established under different circumstances. He proposes quantifying the functional properties of neural assemblies in terms of their dispositional tendencies rather than their computational or information-processing operations. Exploring larger-scale issues, and drawing on evidence from embodied cognition, Anderson develops a picture of thinking rooted in the exploitation and extension of our early-evolving capacity for iterated interaction with the world. He argues that the multidimensional approach to the brain he describes offers a much better fit for these findings, and a more promising road toward a unified science of minded organisms.
eBook
Memory lane : the perfectly imperfect ways we remember
\"Making Memories describes the science of how memories are constructed and reconstructed, revealing how this process of making (and remaking) memories - which has strengths, but also introduces vulnerabilities - is central to the formation of our identities. Rather than retrieving memories fully formed from long-term storage, memories are reconstructed every time we attempt to recall them. The way in which memories are reconstructed can lead to errors and distortions and even to entirely false memories. The authors describe the consequences of these memory errors, including faulty eyewitness identifications and susceptibility to misinformation. Greene and Murphy also discuss the effects of memory distortion in our lives, both negative and positive. The downsides of memory distortions are considerable; however, the authors make the point that they arise not as some anomaly or failure of evolution but rather as a by-product of a \"perfectly imperfect\" process that evolved to solve problems in our ancestral environment. These \"flaws\" are perhaps better thought of as \"features,\" as they help to make us who we are and enable us to go about our lives and make sense of our experiences. The problems arise when we have unrealistic expectations of our memories - for example, if we expect them to record our experiences like a video camera, perfectly preserving the past, which they do not\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Universals and variations in moral decisions made in 42 countries by 70,000 participants
When do people find it acceptable to sacrifice one life to save many? Cross-cultural studies suggested a complex pattern of universals and variations in the way people approach this question, but data were often based on small samples from a small number of countries outside of the Western world. Here we analyze responses to three sacrificial dilemmas by 70,000 participants in 10 languages and 42 countries. In every country, the three dilemmas displayed the same qualitative ordering of sacrifice acceptability, suggesting that this ordering is best explained by basic cognitive processes rather than cultural norms. The quantitative acceptability of each sacrifice, however, showed substantial country-level variations. We show that low relational mobility (where people are more cautious about not alienating their current social partners) is strongly associated with the rejection of sacrifices for the greater good (especially for Eastern countries), which may be explained by the signaling value of this rejection. We make our dataset fully available as a public resource for researchers studying universals and variations in human morality.
Journal Article
Mind-society : from brains to social sciences and professions
\"Paul Thagard's Treatise on Mind and Society is a trio of books: Brain-Mind: From Neurons to Consciousness and Creativity, Mind-Society: From Brains to Social Sciences and Professions, and Natural Philosophy: From Social Brains to Knowledge, Reality, Morality, and Beauty. Mind-Society melds the neural and mental mechanisms in this book with complementary social mechanisms to explain a wide range of social phenomena. The result is an integrated account of five social sciences (economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, and history), and of five professions (medicine, law, education, business, and engineering)\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Cracking the social code of speech prosody using reverse correlation
Human listeners excel at forming high-level social representations about each other, even from the briefest of utterances. In particular, pitch is widely recognized as the auditory dimension that conveys most of the information about a speaker’s traits, emotional states, and attitudes. While past research has primarily looked at the influence of mean pitch, almost nothing is known about how intonation patterns, i.e., finely tuned pitch trajectories around the mean, may determine social judgments in speech. Here, we introduce an experimental paradigm that combines state-of-the-art voice transformation algorithms with psychophysical reverse correlation and show that two of the most important dimensions of social judgments, a speaker’s perceived dominance and trust-worthiness, are driven by robust and distinguishing pitch trajectories in short utterances like the word “Hello,” which remained remarkably stable whether male or female listeners judged male or female speakers. These findings reveal a unique communicative adaptation that enables listeners to infer social traits regardless of speakers’ physical characteristics, such as sex and mean pitch. By characterizing how any given individual’s mental representations may differ from this generic code, the method introduced here opens avenues to explore dysprosody and social-cognitive deficits in disorders like autism spectrum and schizophrenia. In addition, once derived experimentally, these prototypes can be applied to novel utterances, thus providing a principled way to modulate personality impressions in arbitrary speech signals.
Journal Article
Top brain, bottom brain : harnessing the power of the four cognitive modes
\"One of the world's leading neuroscientists teams up with an accomplished writer to debunk the popular left-brain/right-brain theory and offer an exciting new way of thinking about our minds. The revised second edition, with expanded practical applications, highlights how readers can harness the theory to succeed in their own lives\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe
Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost, social mindfulness typically entails small acts of attention or kindness. Even though fairly common, such low-cost cooperation has received little empirical attention. Measuring social mindfulness across 31 samples from industrialized countries and regions (n = 8,354), we found considerable variation. Among selected country-level variables, greater social mindfulnesswas most strongly associated with countries’ better general performance on environmental protection. Together, our findings contribute to the literature on prosociality by targeting the kind of everyday cooperation that is more focused on communicating benevolence than on providing material benefits.
Journal Article
The illusionist brain : the neuroscience of magic
\"Magic is the art of creating impossible effects that violate our expectations, games that conclude with the apparent transgression of natural law. As spectators, we find magic tricks-and the state of true cognitive dissonance that they create-tremendously provocative. Why is our brain caught by surprise? The human brain is a very advanced organ, its capacities highly adapted to our environment and lifestyle. But its capacities are not unlimited. Restricted by limited space and energy, the brain cannot possibly process the vast amount of information that we receive continuously through the senses, and the transmission of information that we do receive is relatively slow and must overcome several bottlenecks. To overcome these restrictions, the brain has developed extraordinarily effective strategies to create a sense of reality from limited information. Magic has learned to \"hack\" these strategies, essentially playing with our unconscious processing. In this book, neuroscientists Jordi Camí and Luiz Martínez explore how magic accomplishes this feat. As magic is fundamentally an art, presented in playful contexts, it has not received sustained attention from scientific disciplines-but as Camí and Martínez show, magic is an excellent entry point into the inner workings of the brain. In twelve chapters, Camí and Martínez explore the ways in which magicians manipulate attention, memory, perception, and decision-making, and what these tricks can tell us about these processes themselves. Early chapters offer an introduction to basic neuroscience and what we know about how the brain creates reality, and later chapters delve more deeply into how magic both sheds light on and impacts how we perceive and act. Throughout, Camí and Martínez draw on their own research and raise fascinating questions that have yet to be explored. This book was originally written in Spanish. The Spanish edition was published in February 2020 (RBA Books)\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Dreaming
Dreams, conceived as conscious experience or phenomenal states during sleep, offer an important contrast condition for theories of consciousness and the self. Yet, although there is a wealth of empirical research on sleep and dreaming, its potential contribution to consciousness research and philosophy of mind is largely overlooked. This might be due, in part, to a lack of conceptual clarity and an underlying disagreement about the nature of the phenomenon of dreaming itself. InDreaming, Jennifer Windt lays the groundwork for solving this problem. She develops a conceptual framework describing not only what it means to say that dreams are conscious experiences but also how to locate dreams relative to such concepts as perception, hallucination, and imagination, as well as thinking, knowledge, belief, deception, and self-consciousness.Arguing that a conceptual framework must be not only conceptually sound but also phenomenologically plausible and carefully informed by neuroscientific research, Windt integrates her review of philosophical work on dreaming, both historical and contemporary, with a survey of the most important empirical findings. This allows her to work toward a systematic and comprehensive new theoretical understanding of dreaming informed by a critical reading of contemporary research findings. Windt's account demonstrates that a philosophical analysis of the concept of dreaming can provide an important enrichment and extension to the conceptual repertoire of discussions of consciousness and the self and raises new questions for future research.
eBook