Detailed descriptions and color photographs for over 100 species are provided, as well as an exploration of their long-standing (and often religious) use by ancient peoples and their continued significance to modern-day culture. Some of the species included have just been discovered in the past year or two, and still others have never before been photographed in their natural habitats.

    The Emotional Brain investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.

    Created primarily for medical and premedical students, 'Neuroscience' emphasizes the structure of the nervous system, the correlation of structure and function, and the structure/function relationships particularly pertinent to the practice of medicine.

    About one-third also have varying degrees of learning difficulty. All of them have impairment of social interaction, communication and imagination - to them the world appears a bewildering and sometimes frightening place. This guide explains how people with autism experience the world and why they need an organized, structured environment. Ways of improving communication, developing abilities and enlarging social interaction are described, and advice is given on coping with stresses within the family.

    Her purpose here is to discuss and illustrate the four types of brain waves--beta, alpha, theta, and delta--with emphasis on what they do, how they work together, and whether we can use their power.--Booklist.

    These outcomes often may be highly constrained and universal, yet are not themselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way.One of the key contributions of Rethinking Innateness is a taxonomy of ways in which a behavior can be innate. These include constraints at the level of representation, architecture, and timing; typically, behaviors arise through the interaction of constraints at several of these levels.The ideas are explored through dynamic models inspired by a new kind of developmental connectionism, a marriage of connectionist models and developmental neurobiology, forming a new theoretical framework for the study of behavioral development. While relying heavily on the conceptual and computational tools provided by connectionism, Rethinking Innateness also identifies ways in which these tools need to be enriched by closer attention to biology.

    The answers to these questions are then pursued in experiments on sensory neurons. Intended for neurobiologists with an interest in mathematical analysis of neural data as well as the growing number of physicists and mathematicians interested in information processing by real nervous systems, Spikes provides a self-contained review of relevant concepts in information theory and statistical decision theory.Our perception of the world is driven by input from the sensory nerves. This input arrives encoded as sequences of identical spikes. Much of neural computation involves processing these spike trains. What does it mean to say that a certain set of spikes is the right answer to a computational problem? In what sense does a spike train convey information about the sensory world? Spikes begins by providing precise formulations of these and related questions about the representation of sensory signals in neural spike trains. The answers to these questions are then pursued in experiments on sensory neurons.The authors invite the reader to play the role of a hypothetical observer inside the brain who makes decisions based on the incoming spike trains. Rather than asking how a neuron responds to a given stimulus, the authors ask how the brain could make inferences about an unknown stimulus from a given neural response. The flavor of some problems faced by the organism is captured by analyzing the way in which the observer can make a running reconstruction of the sensory stimulus as it evolves in time. These ideas are illustrated by examples from experiments on several biological systems.Intended for neurobiologists with an interest in mathematical analysis of neural data as well as the growing number of physicists and mathematicians interested in information processing by real nervous systems, Spikes provides a self-contained review of relevant concepts in information theory and statistical decision theory. A quantitative framework is used to pose precise questions about the structure of the neural code. These questions in turn influence both the design and analysis of experiments on sensory neurons.

    There may be nothing more important to human beings than our ability to enshrine experience and recall it. While philosophers and poets have elevated memory to an almost mystical level, psychologists have struggled to demystify it. Now, according to Daniel Schacter, one of the most distinguished memory researchers, the mysteries of memory are finally yielding to dramatic, even revolutionary, scientific breakthroughs. Schacter explains how and why it may change our understanding of everything from false memory to Alzheimer's disease, from recovered memory to amnesia with fascinating firsthand accounts of patients with striking—and sometimes bizarre—amnesias resulting from brain injury or psychological trauma.

    Kundalini yoga includes habits and practices that "balance the glandular system, strengthen the nervous system, and enable us to harness the energy of the mind and the emotions," explains the author. She clearly explains many facets of this kundalini lifestyle: breathing (including breathing exercises), spirituality, food choices and preparation, chants and meditations, the chakras (energy centers in the body), self-healing, sleep, communication, and using yoga postures for health. This is not an exercise book of yoga postures--although several are illustrated--but a guidebook toward a more spiritual path. "Spirituality cannot be taught. It has to be caught, you have to get it from someone who's got it." The book describes the path to a more spiritual life using kundalini yoga philosophy and practice. You don't have to move to a cave to adopt these practices--the author shows you how you can use them to balance even a busy, modern lifestyle. -- Joan Price

    This remarkable book is the first attempt to establish a theory of knowledge based on the model of virtue theory in ethics. The book develops the concept of an intellectual virtue, and then shows how the concept can be used to give an account of the major concepts in epistemology, including the concept of knowledge.

    Jung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Calvin's is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile intelligence.As Piaget emphasized in 1929, intelligence is what we use when we don't know what to do, when we have to grope rather than using a standard response. Calvin tackles a mechanism for doing this exploration and improvement offline, as we think before we act or practice the art of good guessing.Surprisingly, the subtitle's mosaics of the mind is not a literary metaphor. For the first time, it is a description of a mechanism of what appears to be an appropriate level of explanation for many mental phenomena, that of hexagonal mosaics of electrical activity that compete for territory in the association cortex of the brain. This two-dimensional mosaic is predicted to grow and dissolve much as the sugar crystals do in the bottom of a supersaturated glass of iced tea.A Bradford Book

     You've seen athletes do it at the amateur and professional levels, in all sports: *Members of the Olympic bobsled team just before their run, eyes closed, their bodies swaying back and forth as they visualize the run. *Professional basketball players mimicking the free throw, picturing it mentally, before actually taking the ball and shooting it. *The diver stands on the end of the high board, eyes closed, mentally rehearsing the dive moments before attempting it. Research has now demonstrated conclusively that when you practice mentally - at the correct level of mind - you will gain almost as much benefit as you will when you practice physically. And when you combine both physical and mental practice, your results are far greater. Now you can learn directly from Jose Silva, founder of the World's Number 1 scientifically researched and proven mind training program. Recommended by top athletes like New York Yankees MVP Buckey Dent and others.