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| View Larger Image | The Cognitive Neurosciences III: Third Edition (Bradford Books)
by Michael S. Gazzaniga
| | List Price: | $150.00 | | Price: | $120.00 | | You Save: | $30.00 (20%) |  | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours | | | | | Sales Rank: | 260711 | | Studio: | The MIT Press | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 1399 | | Publication Date: | November 01, 2004 | | Publisher: | The MIT Press |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The third edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions in the study of the biologic underpinnings of complex cognition -- the relationship between the structural and physiological mechanisms of the nervous system and the psychological reality of the mind. Every chapter is new and each section has new participants. Features of the third edition include research that maps biological changes directly to cognitive changes; a new and integrated view of sensory systems and perceptual processes; the presentation of new developments in plasticity; recent research on the cognitive neuroscience of false memory, which reveals the constructive nature of memory retrieval; and new topics in the neuroscientific study of emotion, including the "social brain." The new final section, "Perspectives and New Directions," discusses a wide variety of topics that point toward the future of this vibrant and exciting field. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 4 reviews)
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Mirror Neurons 
Prof Gallese estuvo en Tenerife, y conocía bien su trabajo gracias al compendium de Gazzaniga. Es una buena compilación, al día.
June 12, 2007 | |
A stunning scientific tome 
Michael Gazzaniga has edited a magisterial volume, "The Cognitive Neurosciences III," on the relationship between the human brain and cognition. This monumental 1300 page volume covers a large territory.
The table of contents lays out the ambitious agenda in its listing of sections in this book: evolution and development, plasticity, sensory systems, motor systems, attention, memory, language, higher cognitive functions, emotion and social neuroscience, consciousness, and directions for future research.
The various chapter authors lay out what we know about the brain and how it affects our thinking. This is the third edition of this enterprise, and each new edition provides us with the knowledge of what advances in the neurosciences are telling us.
For me, some of the most important elements of this book are what we are learning about what makes us uniquely human, whether the neurological bases of mathematical thinking, the science of consciousness, the neurological bases of language, the brain's construction of memory processes, or the nature of attention.
This is not a book for the faint of heart in terms of the sciences. It is written for brain scientists and allied academics. Many potential readers will be put off by its rigorous, scientific style and its stunning price tag. But for those readers who want to know what current research tells us about the brain and how is affects human thinking, this is a book that cannot be ignored.
December 25, 2006 | |
Essential reading for anyone interested in cog neurosci
It's taken me two years off and on of steadily plugging away at this, but I've finally finished reading all the articles in this massive book. It contains all new articles, as did the first two "editions" which are really works in their own right, but is similarly structured. The work contains elaborated proceedings of what must have been one heck of a three week meeting in June 2003 of the invited expert contributors. This volume contains 94 review articles, each 10-20 pages in length, divided into 11 sections, with each section introduced by a leading researcher. Sections include evolution and development, plasticity, sensory and motor systems, attention, memory, language, higher cognitive functions, emotion and social neuroscience, consciousness, and a concluding section of a potpourri of perspectives and new directions. There is an extensive color section of 82 plates; I expect in future editions they will be integrated into the text instead of having black and white versions that refer to them. Each article contains remarkable work and for the most part I should think it will be accessible to advanced undergraduate (with at least one neuroscience course under their belt) and graduate students. To take just one example, an article I saved until towards the end because I didn't think would be especially interesting to me turned out to be fascinating--Haxby et al, "Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Face and Object Representation in the Human Brain." Here they used fMRI to study what brain regions are involved, but instead of stopping, as so many studies of this type do, at saying that e.g. the fusiform gyrus is active in representations of faces, they also analyze the contributions of other brain areas that are submaximally activated when faces are viewed. It turns out that these areas are quite important, and that the combinatorial pattern of which brain regions are activated, even if submaximally, provides important information. The article gives a glimpse of how the brain might represent information more generally.
All in all, this book, like its predecessors, is essential reading for anybody interested in the explosively expanding field of cognitive neurosciences.
September 04, 2006 | |
Fascinating
This (sizable) book is the third in a series of updates that are published every five years and whose goal is to delineate in as much detail as possible the status of research in cognitive neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience has become an exciting field in the last fifteen years, this due in large part to the experimental techniques available to researchers. In addition, researchers in cognitive neuroscience have been more willing in recent years to take on research topics that were viewed as marginal from a scientific viewpoint. One of these concerns the scientific study of consciousness, and a large portion of this book discusses the latest results in this area. The book is definitely directed towards experts, but non-experts (such as this reviewer) with a good general background in brain science can still gain a lot from the perusal of the articles. Due to constraints of space, only a few of the articles (of the fourteen that this reviewer read) will be reviewed here.
In their article "From Number Neurons to Mental Arithmetic: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Number Sense," the authors investigate how the brain represents and manipulates numbers. Their investigation covers both human and primate abilities in mathematics, and they use both behavioral data and data obtained from functional imaging to make their case that an elementary number system is present very early in the life in both humans and animals. Preverbal human infants in particular are able to discriminate sets on the basis of their cardinality. Using the method of habituation and recovery of looking time, the authors point out that researchers have shown that both newborns and preverbal infants have the ability to discriminate between sets of visual objects, along with tones or words that differ in the number of syllables, on the basis of their numerosity. The authors though point out the difficulties in studying experimentally the performance of humans and nonhumans in number estimation. The accuracy of these experiments decreases as the numbers increase, and the variability increases with the size of the number, following what is called `Weber's law.' The authors include several graphs that illustrate evidence for Weber's law in both animal and human numerical behavior. As to the actual part of the brain where numerical processing takes place, the authors hold that data from neuroimaging points to the horizontal segment of the intraparietal sulcus in the parietal lobes (HIPS). This data shows that the HIPS becomes more active when subjects estimate the approximate result of an addition problem, rather than compute the exact solution. In addition, HIPS is active when a comparative operation that requires access to a numerical scale is needed. The HIPS can also show strong category specificity for numbers when contrasted with different categories of objects of concepts. In addition, the activation of HIPS is not dependent on the modality of the input used to present numbers, and exists even when subjects were unaware of the presence of a numerical symbol. Lastly, the authors quote neuropsychological studies that indicate that HIPS plays a central role in numerical quantity representation.
An intense debate that has taken place in both cognitive neuroscience and in philosophical circles concerns the domain specificity of cognitive systems. In the article "Domain Specificity in Cognitive Systems," the authors present the electrophysiological, and neuropsychological evidence, as well as evidence from neuroimaging for the thesis of a domain specific organization of the prefrontal cortex. Of particular interest in the discussions in this article is the discovery that neuronal-firing is location-specific and directly associated with accurate recall. In addition, studies of small lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex have indicated that these lesions have resulted in memory loss for some hemifields or visual field locations. Prefrontal neurons, the authors assert, are adapted to and defined by the type of data they retain. Even more fascinating is the assertion that single neurons store single spatial locations, and that memory operations are performed by a dedicated group of prefrontal neurons. If these assertions are true, they have enormous consequences not only for drug design but also for the field of artificial intelligence.
In the article "A Framework for Consciousness," the authors discuss their ideas on the problem of consciousness and the experimental techniques that could possibly support these ideas. Being more theoretical than the rest of the articles in the book, this article is one of the many that have only appeared in recent years due to the change in attitude regarding scientific investigations of consciousness. Indeed, such studies have become respectable in many neuroscientific circles, and this is fortunate given that the study of consciousness has been historically delegated mostly to philosophers, with consequently very few results that shed light on the origin and nature of consciousness. The authors define a `framework' as a "point of view" for approaching a scientific problem, and not a collection of hypotheses as is normally the practice in scientific research. A framework they say is likely to be incorrect in all the details, and holds unstated assumptions, but it is appropriate to use at a time when a field is still in its infancy. The goal of the authors is to explain the problem of qualia, i.e. the connection between subjective sensations and the physical interactions in the brain. They do not attack this problem directly, but instead they use the `neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs)', and outline the framework in which NCC is to be studied. This framework consists of the assumption of a nonconscious homunculus, the existence of "zombie" modes as nonconscious cortical reflexes, the existence of transient coalitions of neurons, explicit representations, and essential nodes, the `higher levels first' assumption, the existence of driving and modulation connections, the assertion that conscious awareness involves a series of "static snapshots", the assumption that attention and consciousness are separate processes, the role of "synchronized firing", and the existence of a "penumbra" or collection of neurons not part of the NCC, that are responsible for the "meaning" behind the neuronal firing.
April 01, 2005 | |
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