Conscious mind, resonant brain : how each brain makes a mind / by Stephen Grossberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Grossberg, Stephen, 1939- author.

Contributor:

Rosengarten Family Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Consciousness.

Cognition.

cognition.

Medical Subjects:

Consciousness.

Cognition.

Physical Description:

xxiii, 738 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University Press, [2021]

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Overview

From Complementary Computing and Adaptive Resonance to conscious awareness

2. How A Brain Makes A Mind

Physics and psychology split as brain theories were born

3. How A Brain Sees: Constructing Reality

Visual reality as illusions that explain how we see art

4. How A Brain Sees: Neural Mechanisms

From boundary completion and surface filling-in to figure-ground perception

5. Learning To Attend, Recognize, And Predict The World

From vigilant conscious awareness to autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease

6. Conscious Seeing And Invariant Recognition

Complementary cortical streams coordinate attention for seeing and recognition

7. How Do We See A Changing World?

How vision regulates object and scene persistence

8. How We See And Recognize Object Motion

Visual form and motion perception obey complementary laws

9. Target Tracking, Navigation, And Decision-Making

Visual tracking and navigation obey complementary laws

10. Laminar Computing By Cerebral Cortex

Towards a unified theory of biological and artificial intelligence

11. How We See The World In Depth

From 3D vision to how 2D pictures induce 3D percepts

12. From Seeing And Reaching To Hearing And Speaking

Circular reaction, streaming, working memory, chunking, and number

13. From Knowing To Feeling

How emotion regulates motivation, attention, decision, and action

14. How Prefrontal Cortex Works

Cognitive working memory, planning, and emotion conjointly achieve valued goals

15. Adaptively Timed Learning

How timed motivation regulates conscious learning and memory consolidation

16. Learning Maps To Navigate Space

From grid, place, and time cells to autonomous mobile agents

17. A Universal Developmental Code

Mental measurements embody universal laws of cell biology and physics.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Rosengarten Family Fund.

ISBN:

0190070552

9780190070557

OCLC:

1237861748