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This book is the integrated presentation of a large body of work on understanding the operation of biological brains as systems. The work has been carried out by the author over the last 22 years, and leads to a claim that it is relatively straightforward to understand how human cognition results from and is supported by physiological processes in the brain. This claim has roots in the technology for designing and manufacturing electronic systems which manage extremely complex telecommunications networks with high reliability, in real time and with no human intervention. Such systems perform very large numbers of interacting control features. Although there is little direct resemblance between such systems and biological brains, the ways in which these practical considerations force system architectures within some specific bounds leads to an understanding of how different but analogous practical considerations constrain the architectures of brains within different bounds called the Recommendation Architecture. These architectural bounds make it possible to relate cognitive phenomena to physiological processes.
Brain Mechanisms: Linking Cognitive Phenomena to Neuron Activity shows how to understand higher cognition in terms of brain anatomy, physiology and chemistry. Natural selection pressures have resulted in all information processes in the brain being one of just two general types: condition definition/detections and behavioural recommendation definition/integrations. Using these information process types, hierarchies of description can be created that map from cognitive phenomena to the activity of the billions of neurons in the brain. These hierarchies make it possible to create an intuitively satisfying understanding of how neuron activity results in human memory, consciousness and self-awareness. These ideas were previously described at a technical level in Towards a Theoretical Neuroscience: from Cell Chemistry to Cognition. This book presents the ideas for a more general readership.
One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.
The book explains how to understand cognition in terms of brain anatomy, physiology and chemistry, using an approach adapted from techniques for understanding complex electronic systems. These techniques create hierarchies of information process based descriptions on different levels of detail, where higher levels contain less information and can therefore describe complete cognitive phenomena, but are more approximate. The nature of the approximations are well understood, and more approximate higher level descriptions can therefore be mapped to more precise detailed descriptions of any part of a phenomenon as required. Cognitive phenomena, the anatomy and connectivity of major brain structures, neuron physiology, and cellular chemistry are reviewed. Various cognitive tasks are described in terms of information processes performed by different major anatomical structures. These higher level descriptions are selectively mapped to more detailed physiological and chemical levels.
How to Build a Brain provides a detailed exploration of a new cognitive architecture - the Semantic Pointer Architecture - that takes biological detail seriously, while addressing cognitive phenomena. Topics ranging from semantics and syntax, to neural coding and spike-timing-dependent plasticity are integrated to develop the world's largest functional brain model.
"This book presents the proceedings of the First International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2010), which is also the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society. A cognitive architecture is a computational framework for the design of intelligent, even conscious, agents. It may draw inspiration from many sources, such as pure mathematics, physics or abstract theories of cognition. A biologically inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) is one which incorporates formal mechanisms from computational models of human and animal cognition, which currently provide the only physical examples with the robustness, flexibility, scalability and consciousness that artificial intelligence aspires to achieve. The BICA approach has several different goals: the broad aim of creating intelligent software systems without focusing on any one area of application; attempting to accurately simulate human behavior or gain an understanding of how the human mind works, either for purely scientific reasons or for applications in a variety of domains; understanding how the brain works at a neuronal and sub-neuronal level; or designing artificial systems which can perform the cognitive tasks important to practical applications in human society, and which at present only humans are capable of. The papers presented in this volume reflect the cross-disciplinarity and integrative nature of the BICA approach and will be of interest to anyone developing their own approach to cognitive architectures. Many insights can be found here for inspiration or to import into one's own architecture, directly or in modified form."--Publisher description.
We look for missing links in the sciences and humanities, but the essential missing link - metaphor - is always in front of us. In Missing Link, Jeffery Donaldson unites literary criticism and evolutionary and cognitive science to show how metaphor has been with us since the beginning of time as a seed in the nature of things. With examples from centuries of poets, critics, philosophers, and scientists, he details how metaphor is a chemistry, an exchange of energies forming and dissolving, and an openness in the spaces between things. He considers the ways in which DNA learns how to liken things that have been, how mutation makes errors and then tries them on, and how evolution is hypothesis - nature's way of "thinking more." The mind is a matrix of relations: neural synapses cascade into ever-changing pathways and patterns. Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is the unbroken thread between matter and spirit. Whether offering analysis of a turn of phrase or chemical reaction, Missing Link presents a vision of literature that is also a vision of the cosmos, and vice versa. It enters the debate between evolution and religion, and challenges scientists, literary theorists, and religious advocates to rethink the relations between their disciplines.
If engineering is the art and science of technical problem solving, systems architecting happens when you don't yet know what the problem is. The third edition of a highly respected bestseller, The Art of Systems Architecting provides in-depth coverage of the least understood part of systems design: moving from a vague concept and limited resources
This handbook on human multitasking provides an integrative overview on simultaneous and sequential multitasking and thus combines theorizing on dual task limitations as well as costs related to task switching. In addition to a wide range of empirical findings and their theoretical integration, the editors provide a number of applications of multitasking, like training, interindividual differences and applied research in traffic and health psychology and music expertise. The book is suitable for people interested in multitasking, that is, for researchers and graduate students of cognitive psychology, movement science, sport psychology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive and neurological rehabilitation, aging sciences, and broader cognitive science.
This comprehensive five-volume set covers notable theories, people, social issues, life stages, the physiology and anatomy of the nervous system, and various mental illnesses or conditions --from publisher description.