Big Brain

ISBN-13: 9781403979797 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 272 str.

Gary Lynch

Opis

In this groundbreaking look at the evolution of our brains, eminent neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger uncover the mysteries of the outsize intelligence of our ancestors, who had bigger brains than humans living today. Weaving together history, science, and the latest theories of artificial intelligence, Lynch and Granger demystify the complexities of our brains, and show us how our memory, cognition, and intelligence actually function, as well as what mechanisms in the brain can potentially be enhanced, improving on the current design. Author of The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux praised it as "provocative and fascinating," and, writing in the New Scientist, Willian Calvin called it "a popular account of how brains enlarge, in both evolutionary and developmental terms" and "a much needed book."

Spis treści

Two Strategies for Internalizing the World - Genes and Evolution - Brains Arrive - Olfaction (Sense of Smell) Designs a Network - From Olfaction to Cognition - The Thinking Brain - Tools for Thinking - Individual Differences - A Short History of the Humans - The Origins of Intelligence - Giant Brains - Extrapolations - More than Human

O autorze

GARY LYNCH is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is the author of more than 550 scientific publications that are among the most cited in the field of neuroscience. He is the co-inventor of a novel family of cognition-enhancing drugs called ampakines. He has been featured in major television networks, newspapers, and magazines ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Popular Science. RICHARD GRANGER is W.H. Neukom Distinguished Professor of Computational Science and of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, USA. He has been the principal architect of a series of advanced computational systems for military, commercial and medical applications, and co-inventor of FDA-approved devices and drugs. His work has been highlighted in numerous popular press and television features, including recent stories in Forbes, Wired, and on CNN.