San Antonio College Library

"In this groundbreaking book, two eminent scientists, Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, deliver a fascinating and fast-paced investigation of how our brains got the way they are, and how they might get better - much better. Reconstructing the Boskop brain leads Lynch and Granger to new insights into how our brain functions: how memory gets encoded; how the process fails with age and disease; how we perceive, act, and communicate; and what mechanisms...

About forty thousand years ago, a new kind of hominid suddenly appeared in Europe and Western Asia. This was a creature unlike any of the other hominids then existing - borderline Homo sapiens, and the enigmatic Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Homo sapiens sapiens, as he has now come to be known, was distinguished from his contemporaries by his increased height, delicate bone structure, and the huge balloon-like cranium that announced an intelligence...

"This successor volume to The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to come. In this entirely new book, Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding...

Alison Jolly believes that biologists have an important story to tell about being human--not the all-too-familiar tale of selfishness, competition, and biology as destiny but rather one of cooperation and interdependence, from the first merging of molecules to the rise of a species inextricably linked by language, culture, and group living. This is the story that unfolds in Lucyʼs Legacy, the saga of human evolution as told by a world-renowned primatologist...

"Meet Blondie, a twenty-four-year old graduate student in mathematics at the University of California at San Diego. She skis and surfs and is an ace at math, but her real claim to fame is her ability to play checkers. She's not good enough to defeat a grand master (yet), but she did earn a spot in the top 500 of an international checkers tournament. Not bad when you consider that Blondie taught herself how to play without reading books, taking classes,...

Traces the evolution of the mind, from apes, Neanderthals, and human ancestors to a burst of creativity that began about fifty thousand years ago, suggesting that the mind will continue to evolve, with enhanced reasoning abilities, ethics, and other changes.

"An evolutionary case for the existence of free will. Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency-or free will-is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines...