The wonder of being human

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Christof Koch

"What links conscious experience of pain, joy, color, and smell to bioelectrical activity in the brain? How can anything physical give rise to nonphysical, subjective, conscious states? Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. This engaging book--part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation--describes Koch's search for an empirical explanation for consciousness. Koch recounts not only the birth of the modern science of consciousness but also the subterranean motivation for his quest--his instinctual (if 'romantic') belief that life is meaningful. Koch describes his own groundbreaking work with Francis Crick in the 1990s and 2000s and the gradual emergence of consciousness (once considered a 'fringy' subject) as a legitimate topic for scientific investigation. Present at this paradigm shift were Koch and a handful of colleagues, including Ned Block, David Chalmers, Stanislas Dehaene, Giulio Tononi, Wolf Singer, and others. Aiding and abetting it were new techniques to listen in on the activity of individual nerve cells, clinical studies, and brain-imaging technologies that allowed safe and noninvasive study of the human brain in action. Koch gives us stories from the front lines of modern research into the neurobiology of consciousness as well as his own reflections on a variety of topics, including the distinction between attention and awareness, the unconscious, how neurons respond to Homer Simpson, the physics and biology of free will, dogs, Der Ring des Nibelungen, sentient machines, the loss of his belief in a personal God, and sadness. All of them are signposts in the pursuit of his life's work--to uncover the roots of consciousness."--Jacket.

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Bernard Weiner

This intriguing new work provides a careful examination of how judgments of ourselves and others relate to problems and, in so doing, yields valuable insight into human interactions and motivational processes. Laying out a general theory of social motivation, the author incorporates a number of well-researched areas in social psychology and motivation to elucidate basic principles that guide human conduct across culture and time. Chapters reveal how responsibility inferences are reached, the manner in which such judgments affect emotions, and the role that "cold" judgments of responsibility versus "hot" feelings, such as anger, play in producing both positive and negative behaviors. The author demonstrates that the ways others are perceived influence the behaviors directed toward them, showing how attributions of personal causality are followed by judgments of responsibility. These inferences then give rise to other-directed emotions such as anger and sympathy which, in turn, generate antisocial and prosocial actions. Providing a conceptual system that permits readers a deeper understanding of motivational processes and suggests guidelines for more effective interventions, this book is insightful reading for a wide range of scholars.

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Gianfranco Dalla Barba

Memory, Consciousness, and Temporality presents the argument that current memory theories are undermined by two false assumptions: the `memory trace paradox' and `the fallacy of the homunculus'. In these pages Gianfranco Dalla Barba introduces a hypothesis - the Memory, Consciousness, and Temporality (MCT) hypothesis - on the relationship between memory and consciousness that is not undermined by these assumptions and further demonstrates how MCT can account for a variety of memory disorders and phenomena. With a unique approach intended to conjugate phenomenological analysis and recent neuropsychological data, the author makes an important contribution to our understanding of the central issues in current cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

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James V. Schall

In The Life of the Mind, Georgetown University’s James V. Schall takes up the task of reminding us that, as human beings, we naturally take a special delight and pleasure in simply knowing. Because we have not only bodies but also minds, we are built to know what is. In this volume, Schall, author of On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (ISI Books), among many other volumes of philosophical and political reflection, discusses the various ways of approaching the delight of thinking and the way that this delight begins in seeing and hearing and even in making and walking. We must be attentive to and cultivate the needs of the mind, argues Schall, for it is through our intellect that all that is not ourselves is finally returned to us, allowing us to live in the light of truth.