An Internet In Your Head
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An Internet in Your Head
Author: Daniel Graham
language: en
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Release Date: 2021-05-04
Whether we realize it or not, we think of our brains as computers. In neuroscience, the metaphor of the brain as a computer has defined the field for much of the modern era. But as neuroscientists increasingly reevaluate their assumptions about how brains work, we need a new metaphor to help us ask better questions. The computational neuroscientist Daniel Graham offers an innovative paradigm for understanding the brain. He argues that the brain is not like a single computer—it is a communication system, like the internet. Both are networks whose power comes from their flexibility and reliability. The brain and the internet both must route signals throughout their systems, requiring protocols to direct messages from just about any point to any other. But we do not yet understand how the brain manages the dynamic flow of information across its entire network. The internet metaphor can help neuroscience unravel the brain’s routing mechanisms by focusing attention on shared design principles and communication strategies that emerge from parallel challenges. Highlighting similarities between brain connectivity and the architecture of the internet can open new avenues of research and help unlock the brain’s deepest secrets. An Internet in Your Head presents a clear-eyed and engaging tour of brain science as it stands today and where the new paradigm might take it next. It offers anyone with an interest in brains a transformative new way to conceptualize what goes on inside our heads.
A Mind of Its Own
THE DAZZLING FIRST BOOK FROM THE WINNER OF THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY INSIGHT INVESTMENT SCIENCE BOOKS PRIZE ‘A fascinating, funny, disconcerting and lucid book.’ Helen Dunmore ‘Fine sets out to demonstrate that the human brain is vainglorious and stubborn. She succeeds brilliantly.’ Mail on Sunday ‘Fine is a cognitive neuroscientist with a sharp sense of humour and an intelligent sense of reality’ The Times Perhaps your brain seems to stumble when faced with the 13 times table, or persistently fails to master parallel parking. But you’re in control of it, right? Sorry. Think again. Dotted with popular explanations of social psychology research and fascinating real-life examples, A Mind of Its Own tours the less salubrious side of human psychology. Psychologist Cordelia Fine shows that the human brain is in fact stubborn, emotional and deceitful, and teaches you everything you always wanted to know about the brain – and plenty you probably didn’t.
The World in Your Head
The World In Your Head: A Gestalt View of the Mechanism of Conscious Experience represents a bold assault on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in science: the nature of consciousness and the human mind. Rather than examining the brain and nervous system to see what they tell us about the mind, this book begins with an examination of conscious experience to see what it can tell us about the brain. Through this analysis, the first and most obvious observation is that consciousness appears as a volumetric spatial void, containing colored objects and surfaces. This reveals that the representation in the brain takes the form of an explicit volumetric spatial model of external reality. Therefore, the world we see around us is not the real world itself, but merely a miniature virtual-reality replica of that world in an internal representation. In fact, the phenomena of dreams and hallucinations clearly demonstrate the capacity of the brain to construct complete virtual worlds even in the absence of sensory input. Perception is somewhat like a guided hallucination, based on sensory stimulation. This insight allows us to examine the world of visual experience not as scientists exploring the external world, but as perceptual scientists examining a rich and complex internal representation. This unique approach to investigating mental function has implications in a wide variety of related fields, including the nature of language and abstract thought, and motor control and behavior. It also has implications to the world of music, art, and dance, showing how the patterns of regularity and periodicity in space and time--apparent in those aesthetic domains--reflect the periodic basis set of the underlying harmonic resonance representation in the brain.