What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory. Now in an affordable paperback edition!

Consciousness and the Social Brain

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Graziano, Michael

Psychology & Counseling

Oxford University Press

Each of us has a protected zone two or three feet wide, swelling around the head and narrowing towards the feet. This zone isn't fixed in size: if you're nervous, it grows; if you're relaxed, it shrinks. It also depends on your cultural upbringing. Personal space is small in Japan and large in Australia. This safety zone, called personal space, provides an invisible spatial scaffold that frames our social interactions. As Michael Graziano argues in The Spaces Between Us, it also organizes our social and emotional spacing, influences our facial expressions, and shapes our interactions with everyday objects including tools, furniture, and clothing. Even ordinary actions like walking are informed by a continuous under-the-surface calculation of threats and obstacles around the body: what Graziano calls a virtual bubble-wrap of active neurons that fire and move us to action, even before we may be conscious of our course corrections in real time. Humans evolved a complex way of interacting with others and their environment, and The Spaces Between Us looks at how this infrastructure may have led to the first smile and to a host of other human activities, from tool use, to courtship, and to a sense of self. The book concludes with a case study of Graziano's son, who had heart-breaking difficulties developing a functioning personal space. Written with poignant narrative clarity, Graziano makes the case for the interested scientific public that this system in the brain is more than a fascinating scientific topic: it's deeply personal and shapes our human nature.

The Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature

Science & Math

Behavioral Sciences

In The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System, Michael Graziano offers a fundamentally new theory of motor cortex organization: the rendering of the movement repertoire onto the cortex. The action repertoire of an animal is highly dimensional, whereas the cortical sheet is two-dimensional. Rendering the action space onto the cortex therefore results in a complex pattern, explaining the otherwise inexplicable details of the motor cortex organization. This clearly written book book includes a complete history of motor cortex research from its discovery to the present, a discussion of the major issues in motor cortex research, and an account of recent experiments that led to Graziano's "action map" view. Though focused on the motor cortex, the book includes a range of topics from an explanation of how primates put food in their mouths, to the origins of social beahvior such as smiling and laughing, to the mysterious link between movement disorders and autism. This book is written for a general audience, and should be of interest to experts, students, and the scientific lay.

The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Instructors Review Copy For Re

ANTHONY

Raulin

Allyn&Bacon

Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors: Religion and the History of the CIA

Product Description 
Michael Graziano’s intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller’s 
Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin’s 
Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, 
Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like “Wild” Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency’s concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, 
Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power. 
 Review \n“‘Intelligence histories are curious things,’ writes Graziano, and his brilliant, highly original book is no exception. In colorful detail and with sharp insight, Graziano shows how the US intelligence community waged the Cold War with innovative but misleading academic theories about world religions. This superb book is a must-read for scholars of American religion and foreign relations alike.” 
 ― 
Andrew Preston, author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy\n“US intelligence agents in the Cold War thought they knew what religion was, how it worked, and how to manipulate it for national security goals. But their methods were grounded in an American religious exceptionalism that often left them flat-footed and unprepared. In this engaging and deftly written book, Graziano illuminates the fallibility of expertise, the role of religious studies in the security state, and the changing place of religion in American life.” 
 ― 
Tisa Wenger, author of Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal\n" 
Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors notes how this close-knit relationship between psychology, theology and espionage in the US dates back to 1942: when President Franklin Roosevelt formed the Office of Strategic Services. . . . Its blind spot was an assumption religion could be used to unify one global culture with a single value system. Graziano says this messianic idea fits well with American exceptionalism: a delusional belief the US is an empire of liberty that has a moral responsibility to export democracy and freedom." 
 ― 
The Independent\n"[A] sophisticated, fascinating and well-written application of scholarship to practical matters of state." 
 ― 
Survival 
 About the Author \nMichael Graziano is assistant professor of religion at the University of Northern Iowa.

History

Americas

University of Chicago Press

Reveals the previous underexplored influence of religious thought in building the foundations of the CIA. Michael Graziano's intriguing book fuses two landmark titles in American history: Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness (1956), about the religious worldview of the early Massachusetts colonists, and David Martin's Wilderness of Mirrors (1980), about the dangers and delusions inherent to the Central Intelligence Agency. Fittingly, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors investigates the dangers and delusions that ensued from the religious worldview of the early molders of the Central Intelligence Agency. Graziano argues that the religious approach to intelligence by key OSS and CIA figures like "Wild" Bill Donovan and Edward Lansdale was an essential, and overlooked, factor in establishing the agency's concerns, methods, and understandings of the world. In a practical sense, this was because the Roman Catholic Church already had global networks of people and safe places that American agents could use to their advantage. But more tellingly, Graziano shows, American intelligence officers were overly inclined to view powerful religions and religious figures through the frameworks of Catholicism. As Graziano makes clear, these misconceptions often led to tragedy and disaster on an international scale. By braiding the development of the modern intelligence agency with the story of postwar American religion, Errand into the Wilderness of Mirrors delivers a provocative new look at a secret driver of one of the major engines of American power.

A long-extinct beetle appears in a physics lab. Four-and-a-half people and a dog are hurled 65 million years through time, to the Age of the Dinosaurs, and paleontologist Julian Whitney and his companions have only one chance for rescue. Meanwhile in the lab, police chief Sharon Earles must solve the mystery of why half a body remains where five people had just been. Physicists try to determine what went wrong but can they fix the vault in time to retrieve the missing people--and do they want to?

Cretaceous Dawn

Graziano, Lisa

Biological Sciences

Leapfrog Press

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