In other words, by all of us."--Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of Love, Medicine and MiraclesRule One for the neurologist in residence: "You ain't never the same when the air hits your brain." In this fascinating book, Dr. Frank Vertosick brings that fact to life through intimate portraits of patients and unsparing yet gripping descriptions of brain surgery.With insight, humor, and poignancy, Dr. Vertosick chronicles his remarkable evolution from naive young intern to world-class neurosurgeon, where he faced, among other challenges, a six week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his skull. In candid detail, WHEN THE AIR HITS YOUR BRAIN illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room."Riveting."--Publishers Weekly

    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.

    At one level, this is a book about the courage, humor, and determination to triumph over illness and disability that many "ordinary people" demonstrate when coping with the extraordinary stress of a brain disorder. At another level, it is a well-referenced and up-to-date textbook that provides a holistic view of the practice of clinical neuropsychology. Included are reader-friendly descriptions and explanations of a wide range of neurological disorders and neuroscientific concepts. Two introductory chapters are followed by 17 chapters that each focus on a specific disorder and include research, clinical assessment, rehabilitation, and a detailed case study. Disorders range across the full spectrum from common ones such as traumatic brain injury and dementia, to rare disorder such as autotopagnosia. Each of the 16 chapters retained from the first edition has been revised to reflect current research and clinical advances. Three new chapters on multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease incorporate discussion of important current topics such as genetically-transmitted diseases, genetic counseling, gene transplantation, functional neurosurgery, and the complex ethical issues that go hand-in-hand with these new techniques. This informative and engaging book will be of interest to students of clinical psychology, neuropsychology, and neurology, health professionals who work with neurological patients, neurological patients and their families, and lay readers who are simply fascinated by the mind and brain.

    But it has never held a more important place than it does today, with both traditional problems and new topics often sparked by the developments in the psychological, cognitive, and computer sciences. Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind is the classic, comprehensive survey of the subject. Now in its second edition, Kim explores, maps, and interprets this complex and exciting terrain. Designed as an introduction to the field for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, Philosophy of Mind focuses on the mind/body problem and related issues, some touching on the status of psychology and cognitive science. The second edition features a new chapter on Cartesian substance dualism-a perspective that has been little discussed in the mainstream philosophy of mind and almost entirely ignored in most introductory books in philosophy of mind. In addition, all the chapters have been revised and updated to reflect the trends and developments of the last decade. Throughout the text, Kim allows readers to come to their own terms with the central problems of the mind. At the same time, the author's own emerging views are on display and serve to move the discussion forward. Comprehensive, clear, and fair, Philosophy of Mind is a model of philosophical exposition. It is a major contribution to the study and teaching of the philosophy of mind.

    Wide-ranging conversation about the ultimate questions of human existence from the influential spiritual teacher and some of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century.

    Dennett, Gerald Edelman, and Roger Penrose, all firing volleys in what has come to be called the consciousness wars. Now, in The Conscious Mind, philosopher David J. Chalmers offers a cogent analysis of this heated debate as he unveils a major new theory of consciousness, one that rejects the prevailing reductionist trend of science, while offering provocative insights into the relationship between mind and brain.Writing in a rigorous, thought-provoking style, the author takes us on a far-reaching tour through the philosophical ramifications of consciousness. Chalmers convincingly reveals how contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology have failed to explain how and why mental events emerge from physiological occurrences in the brain. He proposes instead that conscious experience must be understood in an entirely new light--as an irreducible entity (similar to such physical properties as time, mass, and space) that exists at a fundamental level and cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. And after suggesting some intriguing possibilities about the structure and laws of conscious experience, he details how his unique reinterpretation of the mind could be the focus of a new science. Throughout the book, Chalmers provides fascinating thought experiments that trenchantly illustrate his ideas. For example, in exploring the notion that consciousness could be experienced by machines as well as humans, Chalmers asks us to imagine a thinking brain in which neurons are slowly replaced by silicon chips that precisely duplicate their functions--as the neurons are replaced, will consciousness gradually fade away? The book also features thoughtful discussions of how the author's theories might be practically applied to subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence and the interpretation of quantum mechanics.All of us have pondered the nature and meaning of consciousness. Engaging and penetrating, The Conscious Mind adds a fresh new perspective to the subject that is sure to spark debate about our understanding of the mind for years to come.

    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.

    He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of nerve bible of fin-de-si�cle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology.The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the private domain of psychotic disturbances to the public domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the crisis of investiture. Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some other who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

    The emerging field of ecological psychology focuses on the human niche and our uniquely evolved modes of action and interaction. Rejecting bothmechanistic cognitive science and reductionistic neuroscience, the author offers a new psychology that combines ecological and experimental methods to help us better understand the ways in which people and animals make their way through the world. The book provides a comprehensive treatment ofecological psychology and a unique synthesis of the work of Darwin, neural Darwinism, and modern ecologists with James Gibson's approach to perception. The author presents detailed discussions on communication, sociality, cognition, and language--topics often overlooked by ecological psychologists.Other issues covered include ecological approaches to animal behavior, neural mechanisms, perception, action, and interaction. Provocative and controversial, Encountering the World makes a significant contribution to the debate over the nature of psychology.

    Building on the strengths of its predecessors, it continues to offer an outstanding illustration program and a very broad perspective - encompassing lucid descriptions of behaviour, evolutionary history, development, proximate mechanisms and applications. The Fifth Edition has been thoroughly updated and hones students' critical thinking ability - yet remains reader-friendly throughout.

    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.

    Describing experiments that show that human infants have a rudimentary number sense, Stanislas Dehaene suggests that this sense is as basic as our perception of color, and that it is wired into the brain. Dehaene shows that it was the invention of symbolic systems of numerals that started us on the climb to higher mathematics. A fascinating look at the crossroads where numbers and neurons intersect, The Number Sense offers an intriguing tour of how the structure of the brain shapes our mathematical abilities, and how our mathematics opens up a window on the human mind.

    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

    The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology is a primer for neurology residents, graduate students, and established professionals from other fields who wish to enter behavioral neurology. It provides a clear and coherent introduction to contemporary neurological ideas, carefully contrasting the conventional hierarchical model of brain organization to the newer multiplex model that scientists from biological backgrounds currently use. Instead of presenting laundry lists of arcane maladies along with a key of where in the brain the responsible lesion is, or a compendium of tests for a given situation--the received wisdom that students are required to memorize--Cytowic gives students the historical and conceptual tools they need not only to get up to speed regarding present knowledge, but to go forward.

    -- Dr. David Frawley, author of Ayurvedic Healing and Astrology of the SeersMost people have experienced moments of raised consciousness -- or superconsciousness -- but they do not know how to purposefully attain this state. This book offers you an entirely new understanding of your potential, and how to expand your consciousness beyond anything you can now imagine, to the state of superconsciousness. Many books have been written about meditation, but this new book is something more. The author writes with simple, compelling authority, born of actual experience of the truths he presents. Glimpse into the heart and soul of someone who has spent nearly fifty years exploring the innermost reaches of human consciousness, and who has dedicated his life to helping others on the sacred journey to selftranscendence. Full of advice for advanced seekers.