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Description
How do you get a genius brain? Is it all in your genes? Or is it hard work? Is it possible that everyone's brain has untapped genius-just waiting for the right circumstances so it can be unleashed? From a man who can immediately name the day of the week of any date in history to a "memory athlete" who can remember strings of hundreds of random numbers, David Pogue meets people stretching the boundaries of what the human mind can do. Then, Pogue puts...
3) Focus Pocus
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In this episode we explore your brain's constant battle between attention and distraction by investigating all the ways you focus, from visual processing to mental filtering to prioritizing attention. So pay close attention: your life may depend on it!
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Description
This book tries to fathom how our inner life evolves from one second to the next, as we steer ourselves from one topic to another, as we create and reject alternatives. It's not just a little person inside the head doing all this, though it's natural to assume that anything fancy requires an even fancier designer. Ever since Darwin, however, we've known that elegant things can also emerge (indeed, self-organize) from "simpler" beginnings. And, says...
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John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically...
Description
It's hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how...
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This accessible and entertaining book explores the fundamental connections between life and information and how they emerged inextricably linked, taking the reader on a journey through all the major evolutionary transitions. It records the entire path of how life's information has evolved, starting from the growing polymers of prelife leading to the first replicators, through RNA and DNA to neural networks and animal brains, continuing through the...
Author
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Exposing the mind's deceptions and exploring how the mind defends and glorifies the ego, [the author] illustrates the brain's tendency toward self-delusion. Unbeknownst to us, our brain - vain, emotional, immoral, deluded, pigheaded, secretive, weak-willed, and bigoted - pushes, pulls, twists, and warps our perceptions. Whether it be hindsight bias, wishful thinking, unrealistic optimism, or moral excuse-making, each of us has a slew of mind-bugs...
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"In an informal style replete with illustrations, cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman presents the compelling scientific evidence for vision's constructive powers, and in so doing he unveils a grammar of vision - a set of rules that govern our perception of line, color, form, depth, and motion. Hoffman also describes the loss of these constructive powers in patients who have suffered devastating impairments: the artist who can no longer see or dream...
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How do neurons turn into minds? How does physical "stuff". Atoms, molecules, chemicals, and cells- create the vivid and various worlds inside our heads? The problem of consciousness has gnawed at us for millennia. In the last century there have been massive breakthroughs that have rewritten the science of the brain, and yet the puzzles faced by the ancient Greeks are still present. In The Consciousness Instinct, the neuroscience pioneer Michael S....
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Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors' invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex -- the part...
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Primary experience, gained through the senses, is our most basic source for understanding reality and learning for ourselves. Our culture, however, favors the indirect knowledge gained from secondary experience, in which information is selected, modified, packaged, and presented to us by others. In this controversial book, Edward S. Reed warns that second-hand experience has become so dominant in our technological workplaces, schools, and even homes...
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The philosophy of mind has always been a staple of the philosophy curriculum. But it has never held a more important place than it does today, with both traditional problems and new topics often sparked by the developments in the psychological, cognitive, and computer sciences. Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind is the classic, comprehensive survey of the subject. Now in its second edition, Kim explores, maps, and interprets this complex and exciting...
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Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. He surveys the abilities most often cited as uniquely human-- language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind, and mental time travel-- and finds that two traits account for most of the ways in which our minds appear so distinct: our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios, and our...
Author
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"Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done?...
Description
If you are fifty years old today, you will probably live into your mid-eighties. If you live into your mid-eighties, there is a more than even probability that your brain will decline in function before you die. Over fifty neuroscientists have worked to create a system for strengthening the brain and making it perform with more agility, speed, and comprehension. The Brain Fitness Program is based on the concepts of neuroplasticity--the ability of...
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