Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Self-reference and Self-awareness
Rich in precursors (Kant and Frege) and stimulated by Castañeda's study in the logic of self-consciousness and Shoemaker's seminal paper 'Self-reference and self-awareness', the work of the past thirty-five years on self-reference and self-awareness has generated a wealth of deep, sophisticated philosophy. This volume explores the historical anticipations in Kant and Frege, brings four classic contributions together in one place, and offers five new studies. (Series A)
Awakening and Sleep-wake Cycle Across Development
Sleep and wakefulness undergo important changes with age. Awakening, a crucial event in the sleep-wake rhythm, is a transition implying complex physiological mechanisms. Its involvement in sleep disturbances is also well known. This collective volume is the first attempt to systematically approach awakening across development.A methodological section considers criteria to define awakening in a developmental perspective. Theoretical considerations on development of wakefulness and on its relation to consciousness are included and provide a vigorous impulse to go beyond present criteria and classifications. Age changes are the core of studies on development: a section of the book examines old ...
Neural Basis of Consciousness
Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience make possible an understanding of the neural events that are associated with different forms of consciousness. To fully understand and unveil the mystery of consciousness inside the brain we require examination of the concept of neural basis of conscious mind.This book provides a systematic exploration of consciousness and gives an overview of neural and quantum basis of conscious mind through careful explanation of proposed models and extends these theories challenging some generalised views on consciousness. Each chapter provides a review of the findings and theoretical accounts related to neural basis of consciousness and the mechanisms of the different varieties of consciousness. Professor Naoyuki Osaka (Kyoto University) has been active in experimental research on consciousness and attention for more than 15 years. (Series B)
Caging the Beast
A major obstacle for materialist theories of the mind is the problem of sensory consciousness. How could a physical brain produce conscious sensory states that exhibit the rich and luxurious qualities of red velvet, a Mozart concerto or fresh-brewed coffee? Caging the Beast: A Theory of Sensory Consciousness offers to explain what these conscious sensory states have in common, by virtue of being conscious as opposed to unconscious states. After arguing against accounts of consciousness in terms of higher-order representation of mental states, the theory claims that sensory consciousness is a special way we have of representing the world. The book also introduces a way of thinking about subjectivity as separate and more fundamental than consciousness, and considers how this foundational notion can be developed into more elaborate varieties. An appendix reviews the connection between consciousness and attention with an eye toward providing a neuropsychological instantiation of the proposed theory. (Series A)
Consciousness Recovered
This integrated approach to the psychology of consciousness arises out of Mandler's 1975 paper that was seminal in starting the current flood of interest in consciousness. The book starts with this paper, followed by a novel psychological/evolutionary theoretical discussion of consciousness, and then a historically oriented presentation of relevant functions of consciousness, from memory to attention to emotion, drawing in part on Mandler's publications between 1975 and 2000. The manuscript is controversial; it is outspoken and often judgmental. The book does not address speculations about the neurophysiological/brain bases of consciousness, arguing that these are premature, and it is highly critical of philosophical speculations, often ungrounded in any empirical observations. In short it is a psychological approach pure and simple.
Spatial Cognition
"Spatial Cognition" brings together psychology, computer science, linguistics and geography, discussing how people think about space (our internal cognitive maps and spatial perception) and how we communicate about space, for instance giving route directions or using spatial metaphors. The technological applications adding dynamism to the area include computer interfaces, educational software, multimedia, and in-car navigation systems. On the experimental level, themes as varied as gender differences in orientation and of course, wholly unrelated the role of the hippocampus in rodent navigation are described. Much detailed analysis and computational modeling of the structure of short term memory (STM) is discussed. The papers were presented at the 1998 annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society of Ireland, Mind III. (Series B)
Sisyphuss Boulder
Consciousness lies at the core of being human. Therefore, to understand ourselves, we need a theory of consciousness. In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that prevents it from ever being explained. Consequently, philosophical debates over materialism and dualism are a waste of time. Scientific explanations of consciousness fare no better. Scientists do study consciousness, and such investigations will continue to grow and advance. However, none of them will ever reveal what consciousness is. In addition, given the centrality of consciousness in philosophy, Dietrich and Hardcastle claim that philosophy itself needs to change. That the central problems of philosophy persist is actually a profound epistemic fact about humans. Philosophy, then, is a limit to what humans can understand. (Series A)
Languages of Sentiment
Working from Radcliffe-Brown's landmark concept of social sentiments, anthropologists and linguists examine pragmatic and cognitive dimensions of emotion-language in several societies. Introductory and concluding chapters devote special attention to emotional consciousness. Chapters cover language primordialism in Tamil (Harold Schiffman), the erasure of lamentation in Bangla in favor of referential language praxis (James Wilce), women's discourse in Java that creates dignity by reframing the pain of humiliation (Laine Berman), speech styles signalling intimacy and remoteness in Japanese (Cynthia Dunn), divergent conceptions of love in Japanese and translated American romance novels (Janet Shibamoto-Smith), the syntax of emotion-mimetics in Japanese (Debra Occhi), the grammar of emotion-metaphors in Tagalog (Gary Palmer, Heather Bennett and Lester Stacey), and the lexical organization of emotions in the English and Spanish of second language learners (Howard Grabois). Zoltán Kövecses (with Palmer) examines the complementary relationship of social construction theory to the search for universals of emotional experience. (Series B)
Microgenetic Approach to the Conscious Mind
Many secrets of nature have been discovered since we have a better understanding of microstructures, for example subatomic spheres in physics and genetic structures in biochemistry. This book is set to convey an overview of the history, methods, findings and theoretical accounts of microgenetic research in consciousness and experimental psychology. The reader will find information about how conscious percepts unfold within only a fraction of a second. In a sense, and according to the microgenetic hypothesis, our subjectively experienced perceptual image undergoes formation similar to the process of developing a photograph. Yet the time scale of the awareness-related perceptual development is much finer and therefore accessible only to observation armed with special experimental procedures that are exposed in this book. In addition, the author presents empirical findings and theoretical interpretations from his own lab. Professor Talis Bachmann has been active in microgenetic research on attention, perception and consciousness for more than 25 years. (Series B)
Touching for Knowing
The dominance of vision is so strong in sighted people that touch is sometimes considered as a minor perceptual modality. However, touch is a powerful tool which contributes significantly to our knowledge of space and objects. Its intensive use by blind persons allows them to reach the same levels of knowledge and cognition as their sighted peers.In this book, specialized researchers present the recent state of knowledge about the cognitive functioning of touch. After an analysis of the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of touch, exploratory manual behaviors, intramodal haptic (tactual-kinesthetic) abilities and cross-modal visual-tactual coordination are examined in infants, children and adults, and in non-human primates. These studies concern both sighted and blind persons in order to know whether early visual deprivation modifies the modes of processing space and objects. The last section is devoted to the technical devices favoring the school and social integration of the young blind: Braille reading, use of raised maps and drawings, sensory substitution displays, and new technologies of communication adapted for the blind. (Series B)
