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The advances in neuroimaging technologies have led to substantial progress in understanding the neural mechanisms of cognitive functions. Thinking and reasoning have only recently been addressed by using neuroimaging techniques. The present book comprehensively explores current approaches and contributions to understanding the neural mechanisms of thinking in a concise and readable manner. It provides an insight into the state of the art and the potentials, but also the limitations of current neuroimaging methods for studying cognitive functions. The book will be a valuable companion for everyone interested in one of the most fascinating topics of cognitive neuroscience.
The hypothalamus plays a crucial role in the regulation of food intake and energy homeostasis. Hypothalamic neuronal circuits thus represent a privileged target for the treatment of eating disorders and metabolic diseases. The present eBook constitutes a unique collection of research articles and reviews that highlight new concepts and recent findings about the neuroendocrine control of feeding behavior.
Literature and neuroscience come together to illuminate the human experience of beauty, which unfolds in time. How does beauty exist in time? This is Gabrielle Starr’s central concern in Just in Time as she explores the experience of beauty not as an abstraction, but as the result of psychological and neurological processes in which time is central. Starr shows that aesthetic experience has temporal scale. Starr, a literary scholar and pioneer in the field and method of neuroaesthetics, which seeks the neurological basis of aesthetic experience, applies this methodology to the study of beauty in literature, considering such authors as Rita Dove, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, Toni Mor...
Like in the case of drugs, gambling hijacks reward circuits in a brain which is not prepared to receive such intense stimulation. Dopamine is normally released in response to reward and uncertainty in order to allow animals to stay alive in their environment – where rewards are relatively unpredictable. In this case, behavior is regulated by environmental feedbacks, leading animals to persevere or to give up. In contrast, drugs provide a direct, intense pharmacological stimulation of the dopamine system that operates independently of environmental feedbacks, and hence causes “motivational runaways”. With respect to gambling, the confined environment experienced by gamblers favors the e...
This Very Short Introduction describes the new field of cognitive neuroscience - the study of what happens in the brain when we perceive, think, reason, remember, and act. Focusing on the human brain, Passingham looks at the most recent research in the field, the modern brain imaging technologies, and what the images can and can't tell us.
Imaging in Parkinson's Disease provides up-to-date information concerning new applications of brain imaging to the study of Parkinson's disease. Written by experts in the field, the book focuses on structural and functional imaging methodologies that have recently been applied to study the natural history of Parkinson's disease, with emphasis on the development of the major motor manifestations of the illness as well as cognitive impairment and dementia. Individual chapters address the role of imaging in differential diagnosis and in the evaluation of pharmacologic and surgical treatment effects. In-depth discussion of the use of imaging tools to study disease mechanisms is also provided, wi...
A theory of the neural bases of aesthetic experience across the arts, which draws on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry. In Feeling Beauty, G. Gabrielle Starr argues that understanding the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience can reshape our conceptions of aesthetics and the arts. Drawing on the tools of both cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanist inquiry, Starr shows that neuroaesthetics offers a new model for understanding the dynamic and changing features of aesthetic life, the relationships among the arts, and how individual differences in aesthetic judgment shape the varieties of aesthetic experience. Starr, a scholar of the humani...
How can wordless collections of sounds send shivers down our spines and tickle ancient parts of our brains we share with reptiles? How did a chemist's quest to create a drug to ease the pain of childbirth result in the creation of LSD? Why do goats partake in oral sex, and how can a horse (or even a table) make us weak in the knees? And how on earth could the revered 'father of anatomy' not know where the clitoris was? From tortoiseshell condoms to superstar athletes on hallucinogens, these burning questions are explored and dissected, mixed with insights from some of the world's bravest, cleverest and downright weirdest scientist experimenting on the edge - and themselves. It's a sharp shocker, an eye opener, asking the big questions about what it means to be human, about consciousness and happiness. It'll pull you in and gross out. Exuberantly curious and shamelessly exuberant, Guerilla Science's Zoe Cormier reinvents popular science for a new generation by breaking all the rules. Let's rock.
Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience introduces and explicates key principles and concepts in cognitive neuroscience in such a way that the reader will be equipped to critically evaluate the ever-growing body of findings that the field is generating. For some students this knowledge will be needed for subsequent formal study, and for all readers it will be needed to evaluate and interpret reports about cognitive neuroscience research that make their way daily into the news media and popular culture. The book seeks to do so in a style that will give the student a sense of what it's like to be a cognitive neuroscientist: when confronted with a problem, how does one proceed? How does one read and interpret research that's outside of one's sub-area of specialization? How do two scientists advancing mutually incompatible models interrelate? Most importantly, what does it feel like to partake in the wonder and excitement of this most dynamic and fundamental of sciences?
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