For 50 years, the world’s most brilliant neuroscientists have struggled to understand how human brains really work. Today, says Dale Purves, the dominant research agenda may have taken us as far as it can--and neuroscientists may be approaching a paradigm shift. In this highly personal book, Purves reveals how we got to this point and offers his notion of where neuroscience may be headed next. Purves guides you through a half-century of the most influential ideas in neuroscience and introduces the extraordinary scientists and physicians who created and tested them. Purves offers a critical assessment of the paths that neuroscience research has taken, their successes and their limitations, and then introduces an alternative approach for thinking about brains. Building on new research on visual perception, he shows why common ideas about brain networks can’t be right and uncovers the factors that determine our subjective experience. The resulting insights offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. • Why we need a better conception of what brains are trying to do and how they do it Approaches to understanding the brain over the past several decades may be at an impasse • The surprising lessons that can be learned from what we see How complex neural processes owe more to trial-and-error experience than to logical principles • Brains--and the people who think about them Meet some of the extraordinary individuals who’ve shaped neuroscience • The “ghost in the machine” problem The ideas presented further undermine the concept of free will

Brains: How They Seem To Work

Purves, Dale

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Ft Pr

Brains as Engines of Association tackles a fundamental question in neuroscience: what is the operating principle of the human brain? While a similar question has been asked and answered for virtually every other human organ during the last few centuries, how the brain operates has remained a central challenge in biology. Based on evidence derived from vision, audition, speech and music--much of it based on the author's own work over the last twenty years--Brains as Engines of Association argues that brains operate wholly on the basis of trial and error experience, encoded in neural circuitry over evolutionary and individual time. This concept of neural function runs counter to current concepts that view the brain as a computing machine, and research programs based on the idea that the only way to answer such questions is by reconstructing the connectivity of brains in their entirety. This view also implies that the best way to understand the details of brain function is to recapitulate their history using artificial neural networks. While this viewpoint has received support in the last few years from work showing that computers can win complex games, the brain plays a much more complex game--the "game" of biological survival--which Purves concludes is based on trial-and-error experience.

Brains as Engines of Association: An Operating Principle for Nervous Systems

Computers & Technology

Programming

Oxford University Press

During the last few centuries, natural philosophers, and more recently vision scientists, have recognized that a fundamental problem in biological vision is that the sources underlying visual stimuli are unknowable in any direct sense, because of the inherent ambiguity of the stimuli that impinge on sensory receptors. The light that reaches the eye from any scene conflates the contributions of reflectance, illumination, transmittance, and subsidiary factors that affect these primary physical parameters. Spatial properties such as the size, distance and orientation of physical objects are also conflated in light stimuli. As a result, the provenance of light reaching the eye at any moment is uncertain. This quandary is referred to as the inverse optics problem. This book considers the evidence that the human visual system solves this problem by incorporating past human experience of what retinal images have typically corresponded to in the real world.

Perceiving Geometry: Geometrical Illusions Explained by Natural Scene Statistics

Howe, Catherine Q.

Psychology & Counseling

Springer

Neural Activity and the Growth of the Brain (Lezioni Lincee)

Cambridge University Press

Understanding the role of neural activity in the development of the brain has been a major concern of many modern neurobiologists. The reason is plain enough: since the world influences the brain by means of action potentials and synaptic potentials, activity must be the chief cause of the neural changes wrought by experience. This 1994 volume explores the hypothesis that neural activity generated by experience modulates the ongoing growth of the brain during maturation, thus sculpting in each of us a unique nervous system according to the events of our early life. Brain growth is considered at a macroscopic level by examining brain maps and their modular substructure, and at a cellular level by investigating the neuronal interactions that influence the formation and maintenance of these structures. The ways that experience influences the maturation of the brain at both macroscopic and microscopic levels are described, and the conventional wisdom is re-examined.

Body and Brain: A Trophic Theory of Neural Connections

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Harvard University Press

The major goal of developmental neurobiology is to understand how the nervous system is put together. A central theme that has emerged from research in this field over the last several decades is the crucial role of trophic interactions in neural assembly, and indeed throughout an animal's life. Trophic―which means nutritive―refers to long-term interdependencies between nerve cells and the cells they innervate.
The theory of trophic effects presented in this book offers an explanation of how the vertebrate nervous system is related to―and regulated by―the body it serves. The theory rationalizes the nervous system's accommodation, throughout life, to the changing size and form of the body it tenants, indicating the way connections between nerve cells change in response to stimuli as diverse as growth, injury, experience, and natural selection.
Dale Purves, a leading neurobiologist best known for his work on the formation and maintenance of synaptic connections, presents this theory within the historical setting of earlier ideas about neural organization―from Weiss's theory of functional reorganization to the chemoaffinity theory championed by Sperry. In addition to illuminating eighty years of work on trophic interactions, this book asks its own compelling questions: Are trophic interactions characteristic of all animals or only of those with complex nervous systems? Are trophic interactions related to learning? What does the trophic theory of neural connections imply about the currently fashionable view that the nervous system operates according to Darwinian principles?
Purves lays the theoretical foundation for practical exploration of trophic interactions as they apply to neural connections, a pursuit that will help us understand how our own nervous systems generate change. The ideas in this book not only enrich neurobiology but also convey the profound relevance of neuroscience to other fields of life science.

The universality of musical tones has long fascinated philosophers, scientists, musicians, and ordinary listeners. Why do human beings worldwide find some tone combinations consonant and others dissonant? Why do we make music using only a small number of scales out of the billions that are possible? Why do differently organized scales elicit different emotions? Why are there so few notes in scales? In Music as Biology, Dale Purves argues that biology offers answers to these and other questions on which conventional music theory is silent.
When people and animals vocalize, they generate tonal sounds―periodic pressure changes at the ear which, when combined, can be heard as melodies and harmonies. Human beings have evolved a sense of tonality, Purves explains, because of the behavioral advantages that arise from recognizing and attending to human voices. The result is subjective responses to tone combinations that are best understood in terms of their contribution to biological success over evolutionary and individual history. Purves summarizes evidence that the intervals defining Western and other scales are those with the greatest collective similarity to the human voice; that major and minor scales are heard as happy or sad because they mimic the subdued and excited speech of these emotional states; and that the character of a culture’s speech influences the tonal palette of its traditional music.
Rethinking music theory in biological terms offers a new approach to centuries-long debates about the organization and impact of music.

Music as Biology: The Tones We Like and Why

Arts & Photography

Music

The new and rapidly evolving field of cognitive neuroscience brings together cognitive psychology and neuroscience, drawing conceptual and technical elements from both these traditional disciplines. This union has been motivated by the exciting possibility of better understanding complex human brain functions that have puzzled thinkers for centuries. The emergence of cognitive neuroscience as a discipline in its own right over the last two decades is thus an expression of what many see as the next logical step for both neuroscience and cognitive psychology, driven by powerful new methods for studying the human brain. Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, introduced in 2008, was written to inform readers at all levels about the growing canon of cognitive neuroscience, and to make clear the many challenges that remain to be solved. Now, in this Second Edition, the authors--all leaders in the field--offer what is in essence a completely new book: *The 28 chapters of the original edition have been condensed and combined to 15 chapters for the new edition. *The condensation makes the topics covered easier to assimilate, and better suited to presentation in a single-semester course. *Each chapter has been updated to address the latest developments in the field, including expanded coverage of genetics, evolution, and neural development. *Introductory Boxes in each chapter take up an especially interesting issue to better capture readers' attention. *An appendix reviews the major features of human neuroanatomy and basic aspects of neural signaling. As before, this edition includes an extensive glossary of key terms. And, with every copy, we offer a fully upgraded version of Sylvius 4 Online, which includes an interactive tutorial on human neuroanatomy as well as a magnetic resonance imaging atlas of the human brain. RESOURCES For Students Companion Website The Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition, Companion Website features review and study resources to help students master the material presented in the textbook. Access is free of charge and requires no access code. The site includes: *Chapter Summaries: Concise overviews of the important topics covered in each chapter *Flashcards: Flashcard activities help students to master the extensive vocabulary of cognitive neuroscience. Each chapter's set of flashcards includes all the key terms introduced in that chapter. *Animations: A collection of detailed animations that depict some of the key processes and structures discussed in the textbook. *Online Quizzes: For each chapter of the textbook, the Companion Website includes a multiple-choice quiz that covers all the main topics presented in the chapter. Instructors may assign these quizzes, or they may be made available to students as self-study tools. (Instructor registration is required for student access to the quizzes.) Sylvius 4 Online: An Interactive Atlas and Visual Glossary of Human Neuroanatomy S. Mark Williams and Leonard E. White Sylvius 4 provides a unique digital learning environment for exploring and understanding the structure of the human central nervous system. Sylvius features fully annotated surface views of the human brain, as well as interactive tools for dissecting the central nervous system and viewing fully annotated cross-sections of preserved specimens and living subjects imaged by magnetic resonance. This new online version of Sylvius is more than a conventional atlas; it incorporates a comprehensive, visually-rich, searchable database of more than 500 neuroanatomical terms that are concisely defined and visualized in photographs, magnetic resonance images, and illustrations. For Instructors Instructor's Resource Library The Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition, Instructor's Resource Library includes a variety of resources to help instructors in developing their course and delivering lectures. The Library includes: *Textbook Figures and Tables: All the figures and tables from the textbook are provided in JPEG format (both high- and low-resolution). *PowerPoint Presentations: All the figures and tables from each chapter are provided on PowerPoint slides, making it easy for instructors to add figures to their presentations. *Sylvius Image Library: A range of images from the companion program Sylvius 4 Online are provided in PowerPoint format. *Quiz Questions: All of the questions from the Companion Website's online quizzes are provided in Microsoft Word format. *Animations: All of the animations from the companion website are provided as Flash files. The animations are also provided on PowerPoint slides for easy integration into instructor presentations

Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience

LaBar, Kevin S.

Platt, Michael L.

Woldorff, Marty

Cabeza, Roberto

Huettel, Scott A.

Behavioral Sciences

Sinauer Associates is an imprint of Oxford University Press

The First Edition of this provocative book reviewed a broad range of evidence leading to the conclusion that the visual system does not reveal the physical world by an analysis of retinal images and their representation by the visual system. Rather, what we see is based on the history of the species and the individual as a means of contending with the inherent uncertainty of light stimuli. It follows that visual perceptions are reflexive manifestations of past behavioral success rather than the result of a logical processing of present stimuli. These ideas were met with considerable skepticism. To quote from the preface of this new edition: "Although the ideas and evidence about the genesis of what we see in the First Edition were appreciated in some quarters, the reception in others was distinctly cool. Given the opinion of some critics that the wholly empirical concept of vision we proposed was either unbelievable or incomprehensible, we felt duty bound to try again. Our objective was, and remains, to present a different and seemingly inevitable framework for understanding perception and its underlying neural mechanisms. We hope this new edition will encourage more readers to consider this concept of vision and its implications for interpreting, modeling, and ultimately understanding the structure and function of the human visual system." This refinement and expansion of the argument in the First Edition, supported with much new evidence gathered over the last seven years, has far-reaching consequences not only for understanding vision but brain function generally. The book is written in a way that is understandable by individuals with little or no background in neuroscience, with chapter introductions and summaries that make the overall argument easy to follow. The book includes over 400 bibliographic citations, a complete glossary, and a primer on the organization of the visual system as an appendix.

Why We See What We Do Redux: A Wholly Empirical Theory of Vision

Lotto, Beau R.

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