This will make you smarter

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Rocco J. Gennaro

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal, the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition, the somewhat controversial claim that "consciousness entails self-consciousness" is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science, perception, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology and psychopathology. However, the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and, in turn, sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness, behavior, memory, intentionality, and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work.

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Clive Gifford

Trick your senses and baffle your brain with this crazy book of mind tricks and neuroscience information. You can find out how magicians make use of inattentional blindness when doing magic tricks, and why you miss details that are hidden in plain sight. You can discover why your memory isn't as good as you think, and how it is possible to remember things that never actually happened. This astonishing science book presents a wide range of brain games and mind tricks, and explains how these reveal the working processes of the brain. It will engage and entertain, and leave you wondering: do you really know your own mind?

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Mari Jibu, Kunio Yasue

This introduction to quantum brain dynamics is accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The authors, a brain scientist and a theoretical physicist, present a new quantum framework for investigating advanced functions of the brain such as consciousness and memory. The book is the first to give a systematic account, founded in fundamental quantum physical principles, of how the brain functions as a unified system. It is based on the quantum field theory originated in the 1960s by the great theoretical physicist, Hiroomi Umezawa, to whom the book is dedicated. It poses an alternative to the dominant conceptions in the neuro- and cognitive sciences, which take neurons organized into networks as the basic constituents of the brain. Certain physical substrates in the brain are shown to support quantum field phenomena, and the resulting strange quantum properties are used to explain consciousness and memory. This change of perspective results in a radically new vision of how the brain functions.

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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.