The Autumn Brain Seminars

In 2019 and 2020, a teacher penned monographs whose aim was to instruct neuroanatomy not as textbooks do, but rather by exploring questions students and trainees often ask, altogether innocently–but the answers aren’t straightforward. What have we learned lately about the anatomy of memory? How much of cerebral cortex serves vision? Cortex and subcortex are linked: how are they linked, and what is the functional significance of the connectivity? In this second of two volumes, Miyawaki addresses those three questions in a revised edition of his prior work. The Autumn Brain Seminars is a summation of his decades of teaching.

In 2018 and 2019, a teacher penned short books whose aim was to instruct neuroanatomy not in the manner of textbooks, but rather by exploring honest questions raised in the study of human brain structure. Why is there a crossed organization of pathways? Why has the frontal brain been implicated in language? How does one navigate the brainstem as if in a very familiar place? In this first of two volumes, Miyawaki addresses the three queries in a new edition of his prior work. The Autumn Brain Seminars is a summation of his decades of teaching in hospitals and classrooms.

Ironically, the organ with the greatest reason to differ between the sexes, the brain, is often viewed as the most androgynous of all. Are there differences? Almost by convention, male animals are used in laboratory experiments in neuroscience. Even in clinical drug trials in humans, females are often excluded from the early phases of testing becau

This book provides new insights about learning by synthesising existing and emerging findings from cognitive and brain science.

An eminent psychologist offers a major new theory of human cognition: movement, not language, is the foundation of thought When we try to think about how we think, we can't help but think of words. Indeed, some have called language the stuff of thought. But pictures are remembered far better than words, and describing faces, scenes, and events defies words. Anytime you take a shortcut or play chess or basketball or rearrange your furniture in your mind, you've done something remarkable: abstract thinking without words. In Mind in Motion, psychologist Barbara Tversky shows that spatial cognition isn't just a peripheral aspect of thought, but its very foundation, enabling us to draw meaning from our bodies and their actions in the world. Our actions in real space get turned into mental actions on thought, often spouting spontaneously from our bodies as gestures. Spatial thinking underlies creating and using maps, assembling furniture, devising football strategies, designing airports, understanding the flow of people, traffic, water, and ideas. Spatial thinking even underlies the structure and meaning of language: why we say we push ideas forward or tear them apart, why we're feeling up or have grown far apart. Like Thinking, Fast and Slow before it, Mind in Motion gives us a new way to think about how--and where--thinking takes place.

A eureka-inspiring book that will change your view of the world as you know it. In this compilation of the biggest scientific discoveries of the last decades, Pere Estupinyà clearly and thoughtfully explains to his readers the most innovative ideas sprouting from the world's top scientists' brains... How does the brain act when we are hung-over? Can we trick our body into falling in love? What's the world going to be like in thirty years? All of this, and much more, is explained in this indispensable book for science lovers and the curious-minded. In The Brain Snatcher, the author accesses the world's most prestigious laboratories in order to steal the knowledge of this century's heroes -scientists- and share it with his readers. Through entertaining stories, the reader gets acquainted with the hottest debates in neuroscience, cosmology, genetics, human psychology, sociology of science, and climate change. Moreover, the brain snatcher follows the flu virus through the body; steps into a brain scanner to check if it's capable of detecting his own lies; delves into the frictions between religion and creationism; asks his own hormones why he falls in love; surrenders to the Chaos theory, and sees how disastrous the brain is when it comes to making a thorough decision. He also gets to understand why his pupils dilate when he is having an orgasm; finds the origins of superstitions, analyzes why magazines like Science or Nature make more mistakes than other so-called minor magazines, discovers the reasons that can lead an endearing scientist to keep on investigating until he is 96, and goes crazy trying to figure out what things like antimatter or quantum entanglement are. A buffet of knowledge for those without a science degree, but who are curious about the whys, whats and hows of science!