The Unconscious explores the critical interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and contemporary cognitive neuroscience. Characterised by Freud as ‘the science of the unconscious mind’, psychoanalysis has traditionally been viewed as a solely psychological discipline. However recent developments in neuroscience, such as the use of neuroimaging techniques to investigate the working brain, have stimulated and intensified the dialogue between psychoanalysis and these related ...

A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The...

This volume is a comprehensive overview of the scientific discipline that studies psychological and biological processes and behavior in humans and other animals. It features chapters on the history of the field, the thought process, memory, theories of personality, and key figures—such as William James, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, B. F. Skinner, and Daniel Kahneman—who helped shape the field. The difference between clinical psychology and the growing science of mind, brain, and social beh...

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of inter-disciplinary research in the history of science. This volume...

This book focuses on the matter of neuropsychoanalysis. It shows how the neuropsychoanalytic approach makes it possible to begin to locate within the tissues of the brain some of the metapsychological abstractions that Sigmund Freud derived from his work with purely psychiatric disorders.

The nature of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and brain have become the most hotly debated topics in philosophy. This book explains and argues for a new approach called enactivism. Enactivism maintains that consciousness and all subjective thoughts and feelings arise from an organism's attempts to use its environment in the service of purposeful action. The authors admit that their perspective presents many problems: How does one distinguish real action from reaction? I...

Present day neuroscience places the brain at the centre of study. But what if researchers viewed the brain not as the foundation of life, rather as a mediating organ? Ecology of the Brain addresses this very question. It considers the human body as a collective, a living being which uses the brain to mediate interactions. Those interactions may be both within the human body and between the human body and its environment. Within this framework, the mind is seen not as a product of the brain...

A proposal that extends the enactive approach developed in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to issues in affective science.In The Feeling Body, Giovanna Colombetti takes ideas from the enactive approach developed over the last twenty years in cognitive science and philosophy of mind and applies them for the first time to affective science—the study of emotions, moods, and feelings. She argues that enactivism entails a view of cognition as not just ...

This book looks at dreams from a twenty-first century perspective. It takes its inspiration from Freud's insights, but pursues psychoanalytic interest into both neuroscience and the modern psychoanalytic consulting room. The book looks at laboratory research on dreaming alongside the modern clinical use of dreams and links together clinical and empirical research, integrating classical ideas with the plurality of psychoanalytic theoretical constructs available to modern researchers. Psycho...

An original interdisciplinary study positioned at the intersection of literary theory and neuroscience."Literature matters," says Paul B. Armstrong, "for what it reveals about human experience, and the very different perspective of neuroscience on how the brain works is part of that story." In How Literature Plays with the Brain, Armstrong examines the parallels between certain features of literary experience and functions of the brain. His central argumen...

Consciousness is undoubtedly one of the last remaining scientific mysteries and hence one of the greatest contemporary scientific challenges. How does the brain's activity result in the rich phenomenology that characterizes our waking life? Are animals conscious? Why did consciousness evolve? How does science proceed to answer such questions? Can we define what consciousness is? Can we measure it? Can we use experimental results to further our understanding of disorders of consciousness, s...

2013 sees the centenary of Jaspers' foundation of psychopathology as a science in its own right. In 1913 Karl Jaspers published his psychiatric opus magnum - the Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General Psychopathology). Jaspers was working at a time much like our own - with rapid expansion in the neurosciences, and responding to the philosophical challenges that this raised. The idea inspiring his book was very simple: to bring order into the chaos of abnormal psychic phenom...