The Cognitive Neurosciences III: Third Edition (Bradford Books)

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 1399 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press
• Edition: 3rd Edition November 1, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0262072548
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262072540
• Book Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.9 x 2.3 inches
• Weighs: 7.2 pounds

Product Review
Praise for earlier editions

"This very good and important book confirms the arrival of a major new scientific discipline: cognitive neuroscience."
-- Chris Frith, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"This may be the most important reference book in cognitive neuroscience for the next decade."
-- R. A. Drake, Choice

"a benchmark for what is to come."
-- Sean Spence, British Medical Journal

Praise for earlier editions:

"A hugely impressive volume a breathtaking achievement."
-- Richard Cooper, The Times Higher Education Supplement

"The Cognitive Neurosciences III is a awesome accomplishment. It covers topics from ions to consciousness, from reflexes to social psychology. It is authoritative and encyclopedic, but also lively and unafraid of controversy. Michael Gazzaniga, The MIT Press, and the community of cognitive neuroscientists are to be congratulated for assembling this landmark of twentieth-century science and thrilling preview of what we will learn in the twenty-first."
--Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Blank Slate, How the Mind Works, and Words and Rules

"Successful third editions of large reference works must be reliable sources for their field, and Gazzaniga's The Cognitive Neurosciences certainly is, authored by a remarkable group of contributors. But this book is far more: it is full of exciting chapters touching on such newly important fields as adult neurogenesis, and it embraces controversy where appropriate. In my view, this already superb text has only gotten better."
--Steven E. Hyman, Provost, Harvard University, and Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

"To me, this book redefines the idea of comprehensiveness in a reference work. For the cognitive neuroscientist, it provides the latest in integrative cellular and system work. For the neuroscientist who wants to grasp cognitive functions and mechanisms, it offers a thoroughly up-to-date picture of the field."
--Floyd E. Bloom, Chairman, Department of Neuropharmacology, The Scripps Research Institute

"Another awesome achievement, and truly new as well! With some seventy new chapters and over 100 new authors, The Cognitive Neurosciences III is as up-to-date as current work in the field."
--Endel Tulving, Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience, Rotman Research Institute, University of Toronto

"Gazzaniga and his fearless colleagues have taken on the most challenging topics at the mind-brain interface. Given the brain's complexity, it is easy to get mired in details. This book steps back, looks at the fund of knowledge that has been acquired at all levels of neuroscience, and focuses our attention sharply on the essential questions that fascinate us all: From the mass of cells and circuits that is the brain, how do we come to think, feel, perceive, act, and be aware of who we are? It deftly captures the exciting and ever-challenging journey towards understanding the neurobiology of thought."
--Huda Akil, Gardner C. Quarton Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry, University of Michigan

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.

Reader Reviews
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. 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