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The emergence of language, social intelligence, and tool development are what made homo sapiens sapiens differentiate itself from all other biological species in the world. The use of language and the management of social and instrumental skills imply an awareness of intention and the consideration that one faces another individual with an attitude analogical to that of one's own. The metaphor of 'mirror' aptly comes to mind.Recent investigations have shown that the human ability to 'mirror' other's actions originates in the brain at a much deeper level than phenomenal awareness. A new class of neurons has been discovered in the premotor area of the monkey brain: 'mirror neurons'. Quite rema...
This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday s division into ideational, textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar, and cover a wide range of areas, including aspect, argument structure, noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations, pronominal clitics, theme in relation to writing skills, discourse structures and markers, the role of attention in conversation, the functions of topic, phatic communion, subjectification, formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall, the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.
In this collective volume the origins, neurosocial support, and therapeutic implications of (pre)verbal intersubjectivity are examined with a focus on implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. Entailing a paradigmatic revolution in the intersection of developmental, social and neural sciences, two radical turnabouts are entailed. First, no longer can be upheld as valid Cartesian and Leibnizian assumptions about monadic subjects with disembodied minds without windows to each other except as mediated by culture. Supported by a mirror system, specified in this volume by some of the discoverers, modes of participant perception have now been identified which entail embodied simulation and ...
Current progress in linguistic theorizing is more and more informed by cross-linguistic (including cross-modal) investigation. Comparison of languages relies crucially on the concepts that can be coded with similar effort in all languages. These concepts are part of every language user's ontology, the network of cross-connected conceptualizations the mind uses in coping with the world. Assuming that language comparability is rooted in the comparability of user ontologies, the idea of the present volume is to further instigate progress in linguistics by looking behind the interface with the conceptual-intentional system and asking a still underexplored question: How are ontological structures...
The aim of this volume is to bring together the research in gestural communication in both nonhuman and human primates and to explore the potential of a comparative approach and its contribution to the question of an evolutionary scenario in which gestures play a signuificant role.
The first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. This landmark work is the first systematic collaboration between cognitive scientists and sports psychologists that considers the mind–body relationship from the perspective of athletic skill and sports practice. With twenty-six chapters by leading researchers, the book connects and integrates findings from fields that range from philosophy of mind to sociology of sports. The chapters show not only that sports can tell scientists how the human mind works but also that the scientific study of the human min...
In order to produce coherent behaviour in a complex world, forms of visual attention are necessary in order for us to select appropriate objects for action. Over the past ten years, there have been considerable advances in research into visual attention, with many of these advances linked to interdisciplinary research in experimental psychology, neuropsychology, neurophysiology and functional imaging. This work has begun to allow us to understand not only the functional properties of visual attention, but also how attentional processes are localized in the brain: the cognitive neuroscience of visual attention. This special issue draws together research from leading figures in this field, to highlight recent progress in understanding how selective processes operate in perception and action.
In Posthumanity, Brian Cooney examines this philosophically turbulent era, in which the products of our latest technology will include a new kind of reality, new kinds of minds, and new sorts of bodies for those minds. Until now, major technological innovations have always had an important effect on human history. But our newest technology will alter the human animal to such an extent that the next era could end up being posthuman. Posthumanity introduces key concepts in philosophy in a creative and provocative manner guaranteed to engage the attention of first-year students and other newcomers to the study of philosophy. Using examples from films, television, and science fiction, Cooney advances a fascinating and original argument about technology while simultaneously acquainting students with the foundations of philosophy.
Why you are more than just a brain, more than just a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Who are you? Are you just a brain? A brain and a body? All the things you have done and the friends you have made? Many of us assume that who we really are is something deep inside us, an inner sanctuary that contains our true selves. In Who You Are, Michael Spivey argues that the opposite is true: that you are more than a brain, more than a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Rather than peeling layers away to reveal the inner you, Spivey traces who you are outward. You may already feel in your heart that something outside your body is ...
How do writers represent cognition, and what can these representations tell us about how our own minds work? Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media is the first single-author book to explore these questions across media, moving from analyses of literary narratives in print to those found where so much cultural and artistic production occurs today: computer screens. Expanding the domain of literary studies from a focus on representations to the kind of simulations that characterize narratives in digital media, such as those found in interactive, web-based digital fictions and story-driven video games, David Ciccoricco draws on new research in the cognitive sciences to illustrate how the cybernet...