Subject: Biological Sciences

The Tell Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature

The Tell Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature

Posted by | Sep 19, 2020 | |

John, aged sixty, suffered a stroke and recovered fully, except in one respect: although he can see perfectly, he can no longer recognise faces, even his own reflection in a mirror.

Whenever Francesca touches a particular texture, she experiences a vivid emotion: denim = extreme sadness; wax = embarrassment; orange peel = shock.

Jimmie, whose left arm was recently amputated, can still feel it – and it’s itchy.

Our brains are the most enchanting and complex things in the known universe – but what happens when they go wrong? Dr V. S. Ramachandran, ‘the Sherlock Holmes of brain science’ and one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, has spent a lifetime working with patients who suffer from rare and baffling brain conditions. In The Tell-Tale Brain, he tells their stories, and explores what they reveal about the greatest mystery of them all: how our minds work, and what makes each of us so uniquely human.

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The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

Posted by | Sep 19, 2020 | |

This pioneering account sets out to understand the structure of the human brain – the place where mind meets matter. Until recently, the left hemisphere of our brain has been seen as the ‘rational’ side, the superior partner to the right. But is this distinction true?

Drawing on a vast body of experimental research, Iain McGilchrist argues while our left brain makes for a wonderful servant, it is a very poor master. As he shows, it is the right side which is the more reliable and insightful. Without it, our world would be mechanistic – stripped of depth, colour and value.

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The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently — and Why

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently — and Why

Posted by | Sep 18, 2020 | |

When Richard Nisbett showed an animated underwater scene to his American students, they zeroed in on a big fish swimming among smaller fish. Japanese subjects, on the other hand, made observations about the background environment…and the different “seeings” are a clue to profound underlying cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. As Professor Nisbett shows in The Geography of Thought people actually think – and even see – the world differently, because of differing ecologies, social structures, philosophies, and educational systems that date back to ancient Greece and China, and that have survived into the modern world.

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Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable and Collaborative Groups.

Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable and Collaborative Groups.

Posted by | Sep 18, 2020 | |

A groundbreaking, comprehensive program for designing effective and socially equitable groups of all sizes—from businesses and social justice groups to global organizations.

Whether you work in business or schools, volunteer in neighborhoods or church organizations, or are involved in social justice and activism, you understand the enormous power of groups to enact powerful and lasting change in the world. But how exactly do you design, build, and sustain effective groups?

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Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought

Posted by | Sep 18, 2020 | |

What does it mean to be human? How is knowledge possible? Where do moral values come from? Questions like these have stood at the centre of Western philosophy for centuries. In addressing them, philosophers have made certain fundamental assumptions — that we can know our own minds by introspection, that most of our thinking about the world is literal and that reason is disembodied and universal — that are now called into question by well-established results of cognitive science.

Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. This book re-examines the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality and the self; it rethinks a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytic philosophy. Lakoff and Johnson reveal the metaphorical structure underlying each mode of thought and show how the metaphysics of each theory flows from its metaphors.

Philosophy in the Flesh reveals a radically new understanding of what it means to be human and calls for a thorough rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. This is philosophy as it has never been seen before.

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