Image Transformations Of The Brain Mind

Image Transformations of the Brain-Mind is his latest book that addresses basic questions about SELF and CONSCIOUSNESS. Dr. Just has two major concerns—how the mind emerges from its fetal beginning and matures through adulthood to enable free will (the Supervening SELF) and how sensory image transformations of the brain-mind lead to subjective experience. This book shares numerous insights into: • Virtually transformed sensory images that feel like a little person (homunculus) in our brains. • How the Physical-SELF is transformed into the Virtual-SELF. • How the SELF in dreams feels just as real as it does in waking. • The author’s dream classifications according to type of sensory experience. • Transformative brain-mind images that underlie altered mental states and various religious experiences. • How dream memories and the 24-hour mind become waking déjà vu experiences. • Psychological and philosophical questions of autonomy and determinism.

Kosslyn makes an impressive case for the view that images are critically involved in the life of the mind. In a series of ingenious experiments, he provides hard evidence that people can construct elaborate mental images, search them for specific information, and perform such other internal operations as mental rotation.

Brain Warping is the premier book in the field of brain mapping to cover the mathematics, physics, computer science, and neurobiological issues related to brain spatial transformation and deformation correction. All chapters are organized in a similar fashion, covering the history, theory, and implementation of the specific approach discussed for ease of reading. Each chapter also discusses the computer science implementations, including descriptions of the programs and computer codes used in its execution. Readers of Brain Warping will be able to understand all of the approaches currently used in brain mapping, incorporating multimodality, and multisubject comparisons. Key Features * The only book of its kind * Subject matter is the fastest growing area in the field of brain mapping * Presents geometrically-based approaches to the field of brain mapping * Discusses intensity-based approaches to the field of brain mapping

This long-awaited work by prominent Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn integrates a twenty-year research program on the nature of high-level vision and mental imagery. Image and Brain marshals insights and empirical results from computer vision, neuroscience, and cognitive science to develop a general theory of visual mental imagery, its relation to visual perception, and its implementation in the human brain. It offers a definitive resolution to the long-standing debate about the nature of the internal representation of visual mental imagery. Kosslyn reviews evidence that perception and representation are inextricably linked, and goes on to show how "quasi-pictorial" events in the brain are generated, interpreted, and used in cognition. The theory is tested with brain-scanning techniques that provide stronger evidence than has been possible in the past. Known for his work in high-level vision, one of the most empirically successful areas of experimental psychology, Kosslyn uses a highly interdisciplinary approach. He reviews and integrates an extensive amount of literature in a coherent presentation, and reports a wide range of new findings using a host of techniques. A Bradford Book

An investigation into the brain's chemistry and the mechanisms of chemically altered states of consciousness. In this book, J. Allan Hobson offers a new understanding of altered states of consciousness based on knowledge of how our brain chemistry is balanced when we are awake and how that balance shifts when we fall asleep and dream. He draws on recent research that enables us to explain how psychedelic drugs work to disturb that balance and how similar imbalances may cause depression and schizophrenia. He also draws on work that expands our understanding of how certain drugs can correct imbalances and restore the brain's natural equilibrium. Hobson explains the chemical balance concept in terms of what we know about the regulation of normal states of consciousness over the course of the day by brain chemicals called neuromodulators. He presents striking confirmation of the principle that every drug that has transformative effects on consciousness interacts with the brain's own consciousness-altering chemicals. In the section called "The Medical Drugstore," Hobson describes drugs used to counteract anxiety and insomnia, to raise and lower mood, and to eliminate or diminish the hallucinations and delusions of schizophrenia. He discusses the risks involved in their administration, including the possibility of new disorders caused by indiscriminate long-term use. In "The Recreational Drugstore," Hobson discusses psychedelic drugs, narcotic analgesia, and natural drugs. He also considers the distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate drug use. In the concluding "Psychological Drugstore," he discusses the mind as an agent, not just the mediator, of change, and corrects many erroneous assumptions and practices that hinder the progress of psychoanalysis.

"Brain-Mind presents a unified, brain-based theory of cognition and emotion, with applications to the most complex kinds of thinking, right up to consciousness and creativity. Unification comes from systematic application of Chris Eliasmith's powerful new Semantic Pointer Architecture, a highly original synthesis of neural network and symbolic ideas about how the mind works. Thagard will show the relevance of semantic pointers to a full range of important kinds of mental representations, from sensations and imagery to concepts, rules, analogies, and emotions. Neural mechanisms can then be used to explain many phenomena concerning consciousness, action, intention, language, creativity, and the self. Because of their broad importance, Thagard has tried to make Eliasmith's ideas accessible to a broad audience with no special background in neuroscience or mathematics. The value of a unified theory of thinking goes well beyond psychology, neuroscience, and the other cognitive sciences"--

The central theme of dicussion in this monograph revolves round the problem of man`s self-transformation in the midst of an artificial and soulless civilization. According to the author, the solution to the problem lies in a synthesis between `the rwo principal tradition of India`- Yoga and Tantra which he defines as philosophy and practice. The secret of self-Transformation is at once an indictment of all sorts of monstrosities that under the banner of modern dcience and a call for revolutionary change within man himself.

The last dizzying decade of work in neurobiology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and medicine has begun to part the veil on the secrets of the brain's operation. Kosslyn and Koenig put these new developments in perspective in this accessible introduction to the mind/brain structure. Illustrated.