Tales From Beyond The Brain

Imagine walking home from school one day and seeing a brain on the side of the road, a brain that, it turns out, is looking for a new home. Or instead of paying attention to the teacher, you shoot a paper airplane across the room and accidentally rip a hole in the fabric of the universe. And what would you do if you discovered that your class reading group was actually recruiting kids with telekinetic powers? Tales from Beyond the Brain is a collection of thirteen spooky stories that are as outrageous as they are terrifying. It's a throwback to the weird tales of yesteryear, in the vein of Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone, but with contemporary characters and settings. Getting an education has never been more dangerous.

Most kids don't have to stress about things like exotic insects with a taste for human flesh when they go to class. But students at this school have to be ever vigilant. You never know when a supernatural pastry or a clay monster bent on revenge might be lurking just around the corner. Even a simple field trip to a local animal sanctuary can have ssserious consequences. Dragged fresh from the grave and pulled out of the haunted corners of a school locker, these thirteen new stories are a nod to the storytelling style of Tales from the Crypt and The Twilight Zone. They are guaranteed to make you laugh like a hyena, shake your head in wonder or tremble with fear. A companion volume to Tales from Beyond the Brain.

This book challenges neurocentrism by advocating a systemic view of cognition based on investigating how action shapes the experience of thinking, placing interactivity at its heart. This systemic viewpoint makes three main claims. First, that many elaborate cognitive skills like language, problem solving and human-computer interaction (HCI) are based in sense-saturated coordination or interactivity. Second, interactivity produces a tightly woven scaffold of resources, some internal to the agent and others external, that elevates and transforms thinking. Third, human agents entwine brains, bodies and their surroundings as they manage multi-scalar dynamics. This new edition continues to demonstrate how a systemic perspective casts a productive light on thinking in applied domains such as crime scene analysis, the use of information technology in construction, and computer-meditated trusts and presents new studies on the cognitive ecology of the web, multi-scalar temporal and organisational cognition and the importance of interactive material engagement in digital architecture. Authors use various scales of the systemic viewpoint to illustrate how bodies and artefacts shape thinking, but in all cases the experience of materiality is meshed with activity that involves the world beyond the body. Cognition Beyond the Brain is a valuable reference for researchers, practitioners and graduate students within the fields of Computer Science, Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.

The Anthology Horror short stories compiled in this Volume are based on Real Experience and stories of real people. The names used in the stories are names of real person who are either deceased or have survived a violent event or situation. Some changed their name as requested for whatever reason it might serve them. If I am going down a creepy road at night, I would rather be riding a car rather than on foot. It makes me feel a lot safer and moves around quicker. It doesn’t mean you are always safe though. Sometimes unexplained or just something paranormal are waiting to happen. There is a term for such a phenomenon the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognize as such but appear as real. Sleep seems like a simple human rights does it not? Like eating and clothing the body. If you are hungry and came to me for food, would I hesitate to give it to you? Of course not. If you have nothing to wear would I not give you something of my own? Certainly I would. But if you needed sleep, a few hours of precious oblivion, how could I help you? I couldn’t and there is nothing I can do about it. We live in a changing times that we fear tomorrow more than yesterday. What’s to come next? Will be annihilated in our bed? Will we die from sleep paralysis? Will the ghost that had come with this book never leave you again? Is there any way ever living in peace ever again? Who can save us or the end is inevitable. WARNING: Do not read this book alone. And make sure that you are reading in a well-lighted area. The entities that are associated with this book might interact with you.

When a chimpanzee stockpiles rocks as weapons or when a frog sends out mating calls, we might easily assume these animals know their own motivations--that they use the same psychological mechanisms that we do. But as Beyond the Brain indicates, this is a dangerous assumption because animals have different evolutionary trajectories, ecological niches, and physical attributes. How do these differences influence animal thinking and behavior? Removing our human-centered spectacles, Louise Barrett investigates the mind and brain and offers an alternative approach for understanding animal and human cognition. Drawing on examples from animal behavior, comparative psychology, robotics, artificial life, developmental psychology, and cognitive science, Barrett provides remarkable new insights into how animals and humans depend on their bodies and environment--not just their brains--to behave intelligently. Barrett begins with an overview of human cognitive adaptations and how these color our views of other species, brains, and minds. Considering when it is worth having a big brain--or indeed having a brain at all--she investigates exactly what brains are good at. Showing that the brain's evolutionary function guides action in the world, she looks at how physical structure contributes to cognitive processes, and she demonstrates how these processes employ materials and resources in specific environments. Arguing that thinking and behavior constitute a property of the whole organism, not just the brain, Beyond the Brain illustrates how the body, brain, and cognition are tied to the wider world.

Leading scholars respond to the famous proposition by Andy Clark and David Chalmers that cognition and mind are not located exclusively in the head.

A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of micro-fiction. A delirious collection of short stories from the Latin American master of microfiction, César Aira–the author of at least eighty novels, most of them barely one hundred pages long–The Musical Brain & Other Stories comprises twenty tales about oddballs, freaks, and loonies. Aira, with his fuga hacia adelante or "flight forward" into the unknown, gives us imponderables to ponder and bizarre and seemingly out-of-context plot lines, as well as thoughtful and passionate takes on everyday reality. The title story, first published in the New Yorker, is the creme de la creme of this exhilarating collection.

In these engaging tales describing the growth of knowledge about the brain—from the early Egyptians and Greeks to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance to the present time—Gross attempts to answer the question of how the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its modern incarnation through the twists and turns of history. Charles G. Gross is an experimental neuroscientist who specializes in brain mechanisms in vision. He is also fascinated by the history of his field. In these tales describing the growth of knowledge about the brain from the early Egyptians and Greeks to the present time, he attempts to answer the question of how the discipline of neuroscience evolved into its modern incarnation through the twists and turns of history. The first essay tells the story of the visual cortex, from the first written mention of the brain by the Egyptians, to the philosophical and physiological studies by the Greeks, to the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and finally, to the modern work of Hubel and Wiesel. The second essay focuses on Leonardo da Vinci's beautiful anatomical work on the brain and the eye: was Leonardo drawing the body observed, the body remembered, the body read about, or his own dissections? The third essay derives from the question of whether there can be a solely theoretical biology or biologist; it highlights the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic who was two hundred years ahead of his time. The fourth essay entails a mystery: how did the largely ignored brain structure called the "hippocampus minor" come to be, and why was it so important in the controversies that swirled about Darwin's theories? The final essay describes the discovery of the visual functions of the temporal and parietal lobes. The author traces both developments to nineteenth-century observations of the effect of temporal and parietal lesions in monkeys—observations that were forgotten and subsequently rediscovered.