From Cognition To Being

In this book, Henry Davis McHenry Jr. sets forth his thoughtful conviction that teachers must constantly invent and re-invent ways of being together with their students to enable both a shared mastery and a shared apprenticeship. Philosophically grounded though accessibly written with examples from the author's personal experiences with his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument. Instead of simply providing a list of tips and prescriptions, From Cognition to Being encourages renewed awareness of the relationship between teacher and student.

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

By 2030 there will be about 70 million people in the United States who are older than 64. Approximately 26 percent of these will be racial and ethnic minorities. Overall, the older population will be more diverse and better educated than their earlier cohorts. The range of late-life outcomes is very dramatic with old age being a significantly different experience for financially secure and well-educated people than for poor and uneducated people. The early mission of behavioral science research focused on identifying problems of older adults, such as isolation, caregiving, and dementia. Today, the field of gerontology is more interdisciplinary. When I'm 64 examines how individual and social behavior play a role in understanding diverse outcomes in old age. It also explores the implications of an aging workforce on the economy. The book recommends that the National Institute on Aging focus its research support in social, personality, and life-span psychology in four areas: motivation and behavioral change; socioemotional influences on decision-making; the influence of social engagement on cognition; and the effects of stereotypes on self and others. When I'm 64 is a useful resource for policymakers, researchers and medical professionals.

In this book, McHenry challenges the still-regnant paradigm of knowledge acquisition as the end and means of schooling, supplanting it with an inquiry into what knowledge is. Tracing the development of the idea of knowledge from its roots in Descartes and Locke through the ontological turn in Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Buber, he provides an alternative rationale and vocabulary for a practice of schooling that engages teachers with students in being-together-and-inventing. Philosophically centered though accessibly written, with examples from the author's personal experiences with his own child and his students, the book engages the reader in inquiry rather than argument, leaving her not with a list of tips and prescriptions, but with a capacity for encounter with the actual persons in her classroom.

Gualtiero Piccinini presents a systematic and rigorous philosophical defence of the computational theory of cognition. His view posits that cognition involves neural computation within multilevel neurocognitive mechanisms, and includes novel ideas about ontology, functions, neural representation, neural computation, and consciousness.

This cutting-edge, yet accessible book provides a complete and integrated assessment of the role of emotions in a wide variety of cognitive functions. Including both empirical and theoretical works and debates, this book presents the results of research aimed at understanding how our emotions influence cognitive performance in diverse areas such as attention, memory, judgment, decision-making or reasoning, and emotional regulation. Drawing on years of research that has enabled psychologists to know when emotions have beneficial versus deleterious effects on cognition, the book explores the mechanisms responsible for these effects. Each chapter focuses on a specific cognitive function and is mirrored by a chapter examining the individual differences in the role of emotions on this aspect of cognition, and how this role changes during aging and in patients with mood disorders. Emotions play a central role in the life of every human being as they crucially guide our actions, thoughts, and relationships, helping us detect and identify what is important, as well as what to memorize, understand, and decide. As such, Emotion and Cognition is a valuable source for all undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of cognitive and affective sciences, as well as for experts in the field.

At the beginning of the last century, physicists revolutionised the scientific view of the world. Today biologists are radically transforming our understanding of the processes of life and cognition. Probing the mysteries of the mind, they have been able to prove that, in the act of knowing, the observer and the observed, subject and object, are inextricably enmeshed. The world we live in is not independent from us; we literally bring it forth ourselves. One of the protagonists of this new kind of thinking is the internationally renowned neurobiologist and systems theorist Humberto R. Maturana who was interviewed for several weeks by Bernhard Poerksen, journalist, and communication scientist. In this book, they explore the limits of our cognitive powers, discuss the truth in perception, the biology of love, and give, all in all, an introduction to systemic thinking that is down to earth, imaginative, and rich in anecdote.

Possible new breakthroughs in understanding the aging mind that can be used to benefit older people are now emerging from research. This volume identifies the key scientific advances and the opportunities they bring. For example, science has learned that among older adults who do not suffer from Alzheimer's disease or other dementias, cognitive decline may depend less on loss of brain cells than on changes in the health of neurons and neural networks. Research on the processes that maintain neural health shows promise of revealing new ways to promote cognitive functioning in older people. Research is also showing how cognitive functioning depends on the conjunction of biology and culture. The ways older people adapt to changes in their nervous systems, and perhaps the changes themselves, are shaped by past life experiences, present living situations, changing motives, cultural expectations, and emerging technology, as well as by their physical health status and sensory-motor capabilities. Improved understanding of how physical and contextual factors interact can help explain why some cognitive functions are impaired in aging while others are spared and why cognitive capability is impaired in some older adults and spared in others. On the basis of these exciting findings, the report makes specific recommends that the U.S. government support three major new initiatives as the next steps for research.