Kategoria BISAC: Science >> Life Sciences - Neuroscience

Drugs acting through 5-HT (5-hydroxytryptamine, or serotonin) systems modulate memory and its alterations, but the mechanisms by which they do so are poorly understood. Agonists and antagonists for 5-HT receptors, as well as serotonin uptake inhibitors, present promnesic (memory-promoting) and/or anti-amnesic effects under different conditions, and 5-HT receptors are also associated with neural changes. The Role of 5-HT Systems on Memory and Dysfunctional Memory: Emergent Targets for Memory Formation and Memory Alterations reviews and summarizes the most recent research related to...

Knowing where things are seems effortless. Yet our brains devote tremendous computational power to figuring out the simplest details about spatial relationships. Going to the grocery store or finding our cell phone requires sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. Making Space traces this mental detective work to explain how the brain creates our sense of location. But it goes further, to make the case that spatial processing permeates all our cognitive abilities, and that the brain's systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought...

It is now possible to witness human brain activity while we are talking, reading, or thinking, thanks to revolutionary neuroimaging techniques like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These groundbreaking advances have opened infinite fields of investigation--into such areas as musical perception, brain development in utero, and faulty brain connections leading to psychiatric disorders--and have raised unprecedented ethical issues. In Looking Inside the Brain, one of the leading pioneers of the field, Denis Le Bihan, offers an engaging account of the sophisticated interdisciplinary...

Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a...

Each year, some two million people in the United Kingdom experience visual hallucinations. Infrequent, fleeting visual hallucinations, often around sleep, are a usual feature of life. In contrast, consistent, frequent, persistent hallucinations during waking are strongly associated with clinical disorders; in particular delirium, eye disease, psychosis, and dementia. Research interest in these disorders has driven a rapid expansion in investigatory techniques, new evidence, and explanatory models. In parallel, a move to generative models of normal visual function has resolved the...

The chapters in this volume attempt to establish some foundational principles of a theory of the mind/brain grounded in evolutionary and process theory. From this standpoint, the book discusses some main problems in philosophical psychology, including the nature and origins of the mind/brain state, experience and consciousness, feeling, subjective time and free will. The approach -- that of microgenesis -- holds that formative phases in the generation of the mental state are the primary focus of explanation, not the assumed properties of logical solids. For microgenesis, the process...

Advances in Alzheimer's disease (AD) research have been challenging and without major breakthroughs in understanding its pathological basis. The reigning hypothesis suggests AD is the result of extracellular amyloid deposition that seed to form amyloid plaques, which then grow and kill neighboring neurons. However, there are several inconsistencies with this hypothesis, not to mention the inability to show clinical benefit in several failed clinical trials by pharmaceuticals (i.e., from Pfizer, Eli Lilly, etc.), and it is in the field's best interest to explore and test multiple hypotheses...

Technological advances have greatly increased the potential for, and practicability of, using medical neurotechnologies to revolutionize how a wide array of neurological and nervous system diseases and dysfunctions are treated. These technologies have the potential to help reduce the impact of symptoms in neurological disorders such as Parkinson's Disease and depression as well as help regain lost function caused by spinal cord damage or nerve damage. Medical Neurobionics is a concise overview of the biological underpinnings of neurotechnologies, the development process for these...