Understanding The Human Mind And Consciousness Via The Dynamic Brain

One of the nation's leading neuroscientists presents a radically new view of the function of the brain and the nervous system. Its central idea is that the nervous system in each individual operates as a selective system resembling natural selection in evolution, but operating by different mechanisms. This far-ranging theory of brain functions is bound to stimulate renewed discussion of such philosophical issues as the mind-body problem, the origins of knowledge and the perceptual bases of language. Notes and Index.

This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, but dynamical-systems accounts of mental activity are now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing them to more beyond merely brandishing trendy buzzwords. The Continuity of the Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. In The Continuity of the Mind Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the days events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your thoughts) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that is comprised of diverse mental states. Spivey has arranged The Continuity of the Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. The initial chapters provide empirical demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space.

The practice of Christianity is going through a transition that is deeper than the Reformation. The Thinking Christian explores two main questions: (1) What is "religion" as a general social process that can link humans to Profound Reality, and (2) what is a meaningful and appropriate mode of Christian theologizing, communal life, and mission to this planet for a viable and vital next Christian practice? These are profound probes, and they are communal and activist guidelines for general readers. Such union of the profound and the practical pertains to the needs of scholars as well.

This book explores the meaning and import of neurophenomenology and the philosophy of enactive or embodied cognition for psychology. It introduces the psychologist to an experiential, non-reductive, holistic, theoretical, and practical framework that integrates the approaches of natural and human science to consciousness. In integrating phenomenology with cognitive science, neurophenomenology provides a bridge between the natural and human sciences that opens an interdisciplinary dialogue on the nature of awareness, the ontological primacy of experience, the perception of the observer, and the mind-brain relationship, which will shape the future of psychological theory, research, and practice.​​

A constructive critique of neuropsychological research on human consciousness and religious experience that applies the thought of Bernard Lonergan. Brain, Consciousness, and God is a constructive critique of neuroscientific research on human consciousness and religious experience. An adequate epistemology—a theory of knowledge—is needed to address this topic, but today there exists no consensus on what human knowing means, especially regarding nonmaterial realities. Daniel A. Helminiak turns to twentieth-century theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan’s breakthrough analysis of human consciousness and its implications for epistemology and philosophy of science. Lucidly summarizing Lonergan’s key ideas, Helminiak applies them to questions about science, psychology, and religion. Along with Lonergan, eminent theorists in consciousness studies and neuroscience get deserved detailed attention. Helminiak demonstrates the reality of the immaterial mind and, addressing the Cartesian “mind-body problem,” explains how body and mind could make up one being, a person. Human consciousness is presented not only as awareness of objects, but also as self-presence, the self-conscious experience of human subjectivity, a spiritual reality. Lonergan’s analyses allow us to say exactly what “spiritual” means, and it need have nothing to do with God. “This book makes a seminal contribution to the psychology of religion and is on the cutting edge of the growing interest in the spiritual dimensions of human beings. Daniel Helminiak writes knowledgeably about neurobiology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and even psychedelic experience. His chapter on the ‘God’ concept is a tour de force and worth the price of the entire book. Once I started this book, I could barely put it down.” — Stanley Krippner, Saybrook University “This is an amazing book. It is both lucid and brilliant. Deeply informed by Bernard Lonergan’s systematic treatment of human knowing as a composite of experience, understanding, and judgment, Daniel Helminiak masterfully places study of spirituality within the self-transcending dimension of the human mind and in so doing differentiates and interrelates neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and theology.” — Ralph W. Hood, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga “In this book, magnificently and comprehensively Helminiak struggles toward an integrated perspective on the unfolding of the universe. Focused on humanity, his topic is actually the origins and dynamics of human yearning. As best he can, he meets contemporary theorists on their own ground and repeatedly nudges their thinking toward a more coherent position. The result cuts both ways. It challenges students of Lonergan who underappreciate natural and social processes, and it challenges natural and social scientists who seek a science of mind while subtly sidestepping their inquiring selves. Yet Helminiak presents only a seedling. Its full bloom would be Lonergan’s new, global, omnidisciplinary science, envisaged in Method. It does, indeed, qualify as Patricia Churchland’s sought ‘real humdinger of a solution.’” — Philip McShane, author of Randomness, Statistics and Emergence “Intense, yet lucidly clear, this work by Daniel Helminiak provides a sequel to Michael H. McCarthy’s The Crisis of Philosophy. Helminiak turns a laser on the crisis and not only exposes significant counterpositions, but also offers a solution using the intellectual epistemology of Bernard Lonergan. Worth a read by anyone seeking real explanation rather than mere description, this work invites readers to be weaned from picture-thinking to claim the reality of their intelligence, whatever their field.” — Carla Mae Streeter, Aquinas Institute of Theology

This introduction to quantum brain dynamics is accessible to a broad interdisciplinary audience. The authors, a brain scientist and a theoretical physicist, present a new quantum framework for investigating advanced functions of the brain such as consciousness and memory. The book is the first to give a systematic account, founded in fundamental quantum physical principles, of how the brain functions as a unified system. It is based on the quantum field theory originated in the 1960s by the great theoretical physicist, Hiroomi Umezawa, to whom the book is dedicated. Both quantum physics for sub-microscopic constituents of brain cells and tissues, and classical physics for the microscopic and macroscopic constituents, are simultaneously justified by this theory. It poses an alternative to the dominant conceptions in the neuro- and cognitive sciences, which take neurons organized into networks as the basic constituents of the brain. Certain physical substrates in the brain are shown to support quantum field phenomena, and the resulting strange quantum properties are used to explain consciousness and memory. The whole of memory is stored in such a state of macroscopic order and consciousness is realized by the creation and annihilation dynamics of energy quanta of the electromagnetic field and molecular fields of water and protein. This change of perspective results in a radically new vision of how the brain functions. (Series A, B)