The Attentive Brain

Of the myriad tasks that the brain has to perform, perhaps none is as crucial to the performance of other tasks as attention. A central thesis of this book on the cognitive neuroscience of attention is that attention is not a single entity, but a finite set of brain processes that interact mutually and with other brain processes in the performance of perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills.After an introductory part I, the book consists of three parts. Part II, Methods, describes the major neuroscience methods, including techniques used only with animals (anatomical tract tracing, single-unit electrophysiology, neurochemical manipulations), noninvasive human brain-imaging techniques (ERPs, positron emission tomography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging), and studies with brain-damaged individuals. This part also includes a chapter on the computational modeling of attention. Part III, Varieties of Attention, looks at three major components of attention from the cognitive neuroscience perspective: selection, vigilance, and control. It also discusses links to memory and language. Finally, part IV, Development and Pathologies, discusses the application of findings from the previous sections to the analysis of normal and abnormal development and to pathologies of attention such as schizophrenia and attention deficit disorders. Contributors Edward Awh, Gordon C. Baylis, Jochen Braun, Dennis Cantwell, Vincent P. Clark, Maurizio Corbetta, Susan M. Courtney, Francis Crinella, Matthew C. Davidson, Gregory J. DiGirolamo, Jon Driver, Jane Emerson, Pauline Filipek, Ira Fischler, Massimo Girelli, Pamela M. Greenwood, James V. Haxby, Mark H. Johnson, John Jonides, Julian S. Joseph, Robert T. Knight, Christof Koch, Steven J. Luck, Richard T. Marrocco, Brad C. Motter, Ken Nakayama, Orhan Nalcioglu, Paul G. Nestor, Ernst Niebur, Brian F. O'Donnell, Raja Parasuraman, Michael I. Posner, Robert D. Rafal, Trevor W. Robbins, Lynn C. Robertson, Judi E. See, James Swanson, Diane Swick, Don Tucker, Leslie G. Ungerleider, Joel S. Warm, Maree J. Webster, Sharon Wigal

Chevalier shows how the attentions and inhibitions of affect and norm are best understood at the crossroads of several disciplines, including neuropsychology, semiotics, and philosophy. He delves into these linkages, with an emphasis on the reciprocal concessions between the pleasure principle and the teachings of normative language (moral, rational). These mutual allowances of sentiment and judgment go far beyond cognitive models of the mind. They also bridge the Freudian and Kantian gap between self-enjoyment and morality. Far from being constantly in struggle, The Corpus and the Cortex shows that norms and infractions are the warps and wefts of a single "neurosemiotic" fabric. Symbolic analyses illustrating these intriguing manifestations of brain, language, and culture range from personal anecdotes to cultural identity rhetoric, animal farm imagery, shoe fetishism, and body piercing. The 3-D Mind 2 presents these analyses against the background of theories and debates concerning concepts of identity construction, metaphor, rhetoric, simulation, consciousness, morality, and eroticism.

An attempt to derive a comprehensive theory of attention from both neurobiological and psychological data.

Brain training is all the rage. Commercial and clinical initiatives capitalize on trailblazing interdisciplinary research that spans domains such as education, psychological and brain science, cognitive remediation, and mental health. Promotional materials boast that we can learn to think and respond faster, focus better, and control our emotions; companies and authors market techniques to boost memory, increase confidence, and overcome cognitive impairments. 'How (not) to Train the Brain' examines the field of cognitive fitness and scrutinizes the scientific evidence in support of brain training techniques. With the potential to affect millions this topic is important for scientists, practitioners, educators, and the general public. While many a consumer often marvels at this highly commercialized field, discerning fact from fad becomes a challenge given the abundance of products, publications, and contexts. Moreover, available products prey on the naivety of individuals unfamiliar with the nuanced field of neuroscience, advertising programs that lack scientific validation or presenting unfounded arguments. In this book, the authors review data from hundreds of articles and provide an overarching account of the field, separating scientific evidence from publicity myth and guiding readers through how they should - and should not - train the brain. They describe existing techniques, including those rooted in scientific research, and survey methods that purport to yield measurable improvements. Intended for a wide audience, this book taps a timely topic by highlighting the most salient approaches to boosting brain function while identifying those that don't seem to work.

What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.

How does your mind work? How does your brain give rise to your mind? These are questions that all of us have wondered about at some point in our lives, if only because everything that we know is experienced in our minds. They are also very hard questions to answer. After all, how can a mind understand itself? How can you understand something as complex as the tool that is being used to understand it? This book provides an introductory and self-contained description of some of the exciting answers to these questions that modern theories of mind and brain have recently proposed. Stephen Grossberg is broadly acknowledged to be the most important pioneer and current research leader who has, for the past 50 years, modelled how brains give rise to minds, notably how neural circuits in multiple brain regions interact together to generate psychological functions. This research has led to a unified understanding of how, where, and why our brains can consciously see, hear, feel, and know about the world, and effectively plan and act within it. The work embodies revolutionary Principia of Mind that clarify how autonomous adaptive intelligence is achieved. It provides mechanistic explanations of multiple mental disorders, including symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, autism, amnesia, and sleep disorders; biological bases of morality and religion, including why our brains are biased towards the good so that values are not purely relative; perplexing aspects of the human condition, including why many decisions are irrational and self-defeating despite evolution's selection of adaptive behaviors; and solutions to large-scale problems in machine learning, technology, and Artificial Intelligence that provide a blueprint for autonomously intelligent algorithms and robots. Because brains embody a universal developmental code, unifying insights also emerge about shared laws that are found in all living cellular tissues, from the most primitive to the most advanced, notably how the laws governing networks of interacting cells support developmental and learning processes in all species. The fundamental brain design principles of complementarity, uncertainty, and resonance that Grossberg has discovered also reflect laws of the physical world with which our brains ceaselessly interact, and which enable our brains to incrementally learn to understand those laws, thereby enabling humans to understand the world scientifically. Accessibly written, and lavishly illustrated, Conscious Mind/Resonant Brain is the magnum opus of one of the most influential scientists of the past 50 years, and will appeal to a broad readership across the sciences and humanities.

This collection of essays forms a comprehensive overview of this crucial component of human cognitive function.

This book provides an overview of attentional impairments in brain-damaged patients from both clinical and neuroscientific perspectives, and aims to offer a comprehensive, succinct treatment of these topics useful to both clinicians and scholars. A main focus of the book concerns left visual neglect, a dramatic but often overlooked consequence of right hemisphere damage, usually of vascular origin, but also resulting from other causes such as neurodegenerative conditions. The study of neglect offers a key to understand the brain’s functioning at the level of large-scale networks, and not only based on discrete anatomical structures. Patients are often unaware of their deficits (anosognosia), and often obstinately deny being hemiplegic. Diagnosis is important because neglect predicts poor functional outcome in stroke. Moreover, effective rehabilitation strategies are available, and there are promising possibilities for pharmacological treatments. Attention Disorders After Right Brain Damage is aimed at clinical neurologists, medics in physical medicine and rehabilitation, clinical psychologists and neuropsychologists. It will also be useful for graduate students and medical students who wish to understand the topic of attention systems and improve their knowledge of the neurocognitive mechanisms of attentional deficits. In addition, clinical researchers in neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience will find in this book an up to date overview of current research dealing with the attention systems of the human brain.