We live in the digital age where our sense of self and identity has moved beyond the body to encompass hardware and software. Cyborgs, online representations in social media, avatars, and virtual reality extend our notion of what it means to be human. This book looks at the progression of self from the biological to the technological using a multidisciplinary approach. It examines the notion of personhood from philosophical, psychological, neuroscience, robotics, and artificial intelligenc...

Is it possible to construct an artificial person? Researchers in the field of artificial intelligence have for decades been developing computer programs that emulate human intelligence. This book goes beyond intelligence and describes how close we are to recreating many of the other capacities that make us human. These abilities include learning, creativity, consciousness, and emotion.The attempt to understand and engineer these abilities constitutes the new interdisciplinary field...

Consciousness is perhaps one of the greatest mysteries in the universe. This ambitious book begins with a philosophical approach to consciousness, examining some key questions such as what is meant by the term "conscious," and how this applies to vision.The book then explores major visual phenomena related to attention and conscious experience—including filling-in processes, aftereffects, multi-stability, forms of divided attention, models of visual attention, priming effects, type...

A "fascinating book" that will revolutionize our understanding of the brain and the future of AI (Financial Times)For all of neuroscience's advances, we've made little progress on its biggest question: How do simple cells in the brain create intelligence?Jeff Hawkins and his team discovered that the brain uses maplike structures to build a model of the world—not just one model, but hundreds of thousands of models of everything we know. This discove...

While we have known for centuries that facial expressions can reveal what people are thinking and feeling, it is only recently that the face has been studied scientifically for what it can tell us about internal states, social behavior, and psychopathology. Today's widely available, sophisticated measuring systems have allowed us to conduct a wealth of new research on facial behavior that has contributed enormously to our understanding of the relationship between facial expression and huma...

For Readers of Ray Kurzweil and Michio Kaku, a New Look at the Cutting Edge of Artificial IntelligenceImagine a robotic stuffed animal that can read and respond to a child’s emotional state, a commercial that can recognize and change based on a customer’s facial expression, or a company that can actually create feelings as though a person were experiencing them naturally. Heart of the Machine explores the next giant step in the relationship between humans ...

What happens in our brains to make us feel fear, love, hate, anger, joy? Do we control our emotions, or do they control us? Do animals have emotions? How can traumatic experiences in early childhood influence adult behavior, even though we have no conscious memory of them? In The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux investigates the origins of human emotions and explains that many exist as part of complex neural systems that evolved to enable us to survive.One of the principal r...

A brilliant new theory of the mind that upends our understanding of how the brain interacts with the world**“This thoroughly readable book will convince you that the brain and the world are partners in constructing our understanding.” —Sean Carroll, New York Times bestselling author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and MotionFor as long as we’ve studied human cognition, we’ve believed that our senses give us direct access...

What goes on in our head when we have a thought? Why do the physical events that occur inside a fistful of gelatinous tissue give rise to the world of conscious experience? In The Universe of Consciousness , Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi present for the first time a full-scale theory of consciousness based on direct observation of the human brain in action. Their pioneering work, presented here in an elegant style, challenges much of the conventional wisdom about consciousness....

Understanding how the brain learns helps teachers do their jobs more effectively. Primary researchers share the latest findings on the learning process and address their implications for educational theory and practice. Explore applications, examples, and suggestions for further thought and research; numerous charts and diagrams; strategies for all subject areas; and new ways of thinking about intelligence, academic ability, and learning disability.

The applications of Artificial Intelligence lie all around us; in our homes, schools and offices, in our cinemas, in art galleries and - not least - on the Internet. The results of Artificial Intelligence have been invaluable to biologists, psychologists, and linguists in helping to understand the processes of memory, learning, and language from a fresh angle. As a concept, Artificial Intelligence has fuelled and sharpened the philosophical debates concerning the nature of the mind, intell...

An essential reconsideration of one of the most far-reaching theories in modern neuroscience and psychology.In 1992, a group of neuroscientists from Parma, Italy, reported a new class of brain cells discovered in the motor cortex of the macaque monkey. These cells, later dubbed mirror neurons, responded equally well during the monkey’s own motor actions, such as grabbing an object, and while the monkey watched someone else perform similar motor actions. Researchers...