Burgeoning advancements in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousness--the very center of human concern--by scientific means. In this illuminating book, Dr. Gerald M. Edelman offers a new theory of knowledge based on striking scientific findings about how the brain works. And he addresses the related compelling question: Does the latest research imply that all knowledge can be reduced to scientific description? Edelman's brain-based approach to knowledge has rich implications for our understanding of...
Burgeoning advancements in brain science are opening up new perspectives on how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, it is now possible to explore consciousn...
In A Universe of Consciousness, Gerald Edelman builds on the radical ideas he introduced in his monumental trilogy-Neural Darwinism, Topobiology, and The Remembered Present-to present for the first time an empirically supported full-scale theory of consciousness. He and the neurobiolgist Giulio Tononi show how they use ingenious technology to detect the most minute brain currents and to identify the specific brain waves that correlate with particular conscious experiences. The results of this pioneering work challenge the conventional wisdom about consciousness.
In A Universe of Consciousness, Gerald Edelman builds on the radical ideas he introduced in his monumental trilogy-Neural Darwinism, Topobiology, and ...
A genuine understanding of how mental states arise from the structure and function of the brain would be, as William James declared in 1892, "the scientific achievement before which all past achievements would pale." Can a comprehensive biological theory of consciousness be constructed in 1990? Any attempt has to reconcile evidence garnered from such diverse fields as developmental and evolutionary biology, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, cognitive psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy.Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (Basic Books, 1987)...
A genuine understanding of how mental states arise from the structure and function of the brain would be, as William James declared in 1892, "the scie...
If you had a complete copy of a dinosaur's DNA and the genetic code, you still would not be able to make a dinosaur--or even determine what one looked like. Why? How do animals get their shape and how does shape evolve? In this important book, Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman challenges the notion that an understanding of the genetic code and of cell differentiation is sufficient to answer these questions. Rather, he argues, a trio of related issues must also be investigated--the development of form, the evolution of form, and the morphological and functional bases of behavior....
If you had a complete copy of a dinosaur's DNA and the genetic code, you still would not be able to make a dinosaur--or even determine what one looked...
One of the vastly exciting areas in modern science involves the study of the brain. Recent research focuses not only on how the brain works but how it is related to what we normally call the mind, and throws new light on human behavior. Progress has been made in researching all that relates to interior man, why he thinks and feels as he does, what values he chooses to adopt, and what practices to scorn. All of these attributes make us human and help to explain art, philosophy, and religions. Motion, sight, and memory, as well as emotions and the sentiments common to humans, are all given...
One of the vastly exciting areas in modern science involves the study of the brain. Recent research focuses not only on how the brain works but how...
Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what abandons you every evening when you fall asleep and reappears the next morning when you wake up. But why should the physical events occurring inside certain parts of our brain give rise to the phantasmagoric world of conscious experience - a world that contains everything we feel, know, and are? In this short non-technical text, Edelman and Tononi reveal exactly how the vast panorama of consciousness arises.
Everyone knows what consciousness is: it is what abandons you every evening when you fall asleep and reappears the next morning when you wake up. But ...
We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman takes issue with the many current cognitive and behavioral approaches to the brain that leave biology out of the picture, and argues that the workings of the brain more closely resemble the living ecology of a jungle than they do the activities of a computer. Some startling conclusions emerge from these ideas: individuality is necessarily at the very center of what it means to have a mind, no creature is born...
We are on the verge of a revolution in neuroscience as significant as the Galilean revolution in physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology. Nobel...
This significant contribution to neuroscience consists of two papers, the first by Mountcastle an, the second by Edelman. Between them, they examine from different but complementary directions the relationships that connect the higher brain--memory, learning, perception, thinking--with what goes on at the most basic levels of neural activity, with particular stress on the role of local neuronal circuits.Edelman's major hypothesis is that "the conscious state results from phasic reentrant signaling occurring in parallel processes that involve associations between stored patterns and current...
This significant contribution to neuroscience consists of two papers, the first by Mountcastle an, the second by Edelman. Between them, they examin...
