In this new book, neuroscientist Eric R. Kandel, whose remarkable scientific career and deep interest in art give him a unique perspective, demonstrates how science can inform the way we experience a work of art and seek to understand its meaning.

从大脑神经工作原理解释意识的产生和发展。

In "Reinventing Discovery", Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. "Reinventing Discovery" tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book - the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today - and why the revolution is just beginning.

How does life prosper in a complex and erratic world? While we know that nature follows patterns - such as the law of gravity - our everyday lives are beyond what known science can predict. We nevertheless muddle through even in the absence of theories of how to act. But how do we do it? In Probably Approximately Correct, computer scientist Leslie Valiant presents a masterful synthesis of learning and evolution to show how both individually and collectively we not only survive, but prosper in a world as complex as our own. The key is "probably approximately correct" algorithms, a concept Valiant developed to explain how effective behavior can be learned. The model shows that pragmatically coping with a problem can provide a satisfactory solution in the absence of any theory of the problem. After all, finding a mate does not require a theory of mating. Valiant's theory reveals the shared computational nature of evolution and learning, and sheds light on perennial questions such as nature versus nurture and the limits of artificial intelligence.

Most of us have no idea why we fail to reach our goals. Now eminent social psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson shows us how we can finally win by revealing how goals really work -- and by showing us how to avoid what typically goes wrong.
Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson offers insights -- many surprising -- that listeners can use immediately, including how to:
Set a goal so that you will persist even in the face of adversity
Build willpower, which can be strengthened like a muscle
Avoid the kind of positive thinking that makes people fail
The strategies outlined in this book will not only help everyone reach their own goals but will also prove invaluable to parents, teachers, coaches, and employers. Dr. Grant Halvorson shows listeners a new approach to problem solving that will change the way they approach their entire lives.

What makes people smarter than computers? These volumes by a pioneering neurocomputing group suggest that the answer lies in the massively parallel architecture of the human mind. They describe a new theory of cognition called connectionism that is challenging the idea of symbolic computation that has traditionally been at the center of debate in theoretical discussions about the mind. The authors' theory assumes the mind is composed of a great number of elementary units connected in a neural network. Mental processes are interactions between these units which excite and inhibit each other in parallel rather than sequential operations. In this context, knowledge can no longer be thought of as stored in localized structures; instead, it consists of the connections between pairs of units that are distributed throughout the network. Volume 1 lays the foundations of this exciting theory of parallel distributed processing, while Volume 2 applies it to a number of specific issues in cognitive science and neuroscience, with chapters describing models of aspects of perception, memory, language, and thought. David E. Rumelhart is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. James L. McClelland is Professor of Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. A Bradford Book.

Best-selling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.
The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield―both had important careers in the Israeli military―and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind’s view of its own mind.

One of the world's leading neuroscientists explores how best to understand the human condition by examining the biological, psychological, and highly social nature of our species within the social context of our lives.
What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his widely accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga looks to a broad range of studies to pinpoint the change that made us thinking, sentient humans, different from our predecessors.
Neuroscience has been fixated on the life of the psychological self for the past fifty years, focusing on the brain systems underlying language, memory, emotion, and perception. What it has not done is consider the stark reality that most of the time we humans are thinking about social processes, comparing ourselves to and estimating the intentions of others. In Human, Gazzaniga explores a number of related issues, including what makes human brains unique, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.

Shows us the science behind the hit series "Lie to Me: the Truth is Written on our Faces" This is the only book helps you "read faces," and interpret their emotions, in an easy-to-read visual format. There are hundreds of illustrations which show how to tell what someone is experiencing. Great for viewers of "Lie to Me," people interested in understanding their friends and coworkers, and students in College and High School. Dr. Paul Ekman, who is the basis for the character Cal Lightman in "Lie to Me," is the researcher who developed the new science of face recognition. There is a lot of media and popular interest in this work, as well as its use in the classroom. "I've been familiar with Ekman's work for several years now; I have found nothing else that even comes close to Unmasking the Face] providing the reader with the knowledge they need to master the science of reading the emotions of others by decoding their facial expressions. Ekman is the king " Vincent Harris --

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially.
Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development.
Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.

How do groups of neurons interact to enable the organism to see, decide, and move appropriately? What are the principles whereby networks of neurons represent and compute? These are the central questions probed by The Computational Brain. Churchland and Sejnowski address the foundational ideas of the emerging field of computational neuroscience, examine a diverse range of neural network models, and consider future directions of the field. The Computational Brain is the first unified and broadly accessible book to bring together computational concepts and behavioral data within a neurobiological framework.Computer models constrained by neurobiological data can help reveal how -networks of neurons subserve perception and behavior - bow their physical interactions can yield global results in perception and behavior, and how their physical properties are used to code information and compute solutions. The Computational Brain focuses mainly on three domains: visual perception, learning and memory, and sensorimotor integration. Examples of recent computer models in these domains are discussed in detail, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and extracting principles applicable to other domains. Churchland and Sejnowski show how both abstract models and neurobiologically realistic models can have useful roles in computational neuroscience, and they predict the coevolution of models and experiments at many levels of organization, from the neuron to the system.The Computational Brain addresses a broad audience: neuroscientists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers. It is written for both the expert and novice. A basic overview of neuroscience and computational theory is provided, followed by a study of some of the most recent and sophisticated modeling work in the context of relevant neurobiological research. Technical terms are clearly explained in the text, and definitions are provided in an extensive glossary. The appendix contains a precis of neurobiological techniques.Patricia S. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, and a MacArthur Fellow. Terrence J. Sejnowski is Professor of Biology at the University of California, San Diego, Professor at the Salk Institute, where he is Director of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology.

Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.

This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

"There are books--few and far between--which carefully, delightfully, and genuinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some central issues in Western philosophy and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity."--Yaakov Garb, San Francisco Chronicle

In "The Meaning of the Body", Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic "Metaphors We Live By". Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning - including images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors - that are all rooted in the body's physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources.Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world.

Winner of the 2002 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology presented by Division 7 (Developmental Psychology Division) of the American Psychological Association (APA). The award is given to the author of a book in the field of psychology that has had or promises to have a profound effect on one or more of the areas represented by Division 7 of the APA. and Winner of the 2000 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Annual Awards Competition in the category of Psychology, presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.
How do children learn that the word "dog" refers not to all four-legged animals, and not just to Ralph, but to all members of a particular species? How do they learn the meanings of verbs like "think," adjectives like "good," and words for abstract entities such as "mortgage" and "story"? The acquisition of word meaning is one of the fundamental issues in the study of mind.
According to Paul Bloom, children learn words through sophisticated cognitive abilities that exist for other purposes. These include the ability to infer others' intentions, the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic structure, and certain general learning and memory abilities. Although other researchers have associated word learning with some of these capacities, Bloom is the first to show how a complete explanation requires all of them. The acquisition of even simple nouns requires rich conceptual, social, and linguistic capacities interacting in complex ways.
This book requires no background in psychology or linguistics and is written in a clear, engaging style. Topics include the effects of language on spatial reasoning, the origin of essentialist beliefs, and the young child's understanding of representational art. The book should appeal to general readers interested in language and cognition as well as to researchers in the field.

Words, Thoughts, and Theories articulates and defends the "theory theory" of cognitive and semantic development, the idea that infants and young children, like scientists, learn about the world by forming and revising theories, a view of the origins of knowledge and meaning that has broad implications for cognitive science.Gopnik and Meltzoff interweave philosophical arguments and empirical data from their own and other's research. Both the philosophy and the psychology, the arguments and the data, address the same fundamental epistemological question: How do we come to understand the world around us?Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories. It is also the first to apply the theory to infancy and early childhood, to use the theory to provide a framework for understanding semantic development, and to demonstrate that language acquisition influences theory change in children.The authors show that children just beginning to talk are engaged in profound restructurings of several domains of knowledge. These restructurings are similar to theory changes in science, and they influence children's early semantic development, since children's cognitive concerns shape and motivate their use of very early words. But, in addition, children pay attention to the language they hear around them and this too reshapes their cognition, and causes them to reorganize their theories.