Mind's Past
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A01=Michael S. Gazzaniga
academic
adaptation
Author_Michael S. Gazzaniga
autobiographical
belief
brain
brain activity
brain development
Category=JMR
Category=PSAN
conscious
consciousness
construction
cultural studies
decision making
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
experiments
faith
false memories
human brain
human evolution
human experience
human mind
human nature
judgment
know yourself
lab work
memory
mental development
neurology
neuroscience
neuroscientist
perception
scholarly
self esteem
self knowledge
social studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780520224865
- Weight: 227g
- Dimensions: 127 x 178mm
- Publication Date: 17 Oct 2000
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? In this ground-breaking work, Michael S. Gazzaniga, one of the world's foremost cognitive neuroscientists, shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past - a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into question our everyday notions of self and reality. The implications of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory, the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we are and how we fit into the world around us. Over the past thirty years, the mind sciences have developed a picture not only of how our brains are built but also of what they were built to do. The emerging picture is wonderfully clear and pointed, underlining William James' notion that humans have far more instincts than other animals. Every baby is born with circuits that compute information enabling it to function in the physical world.
Even what helps us to establish our understanding of social relations may have grown out of perceptual laws delivered to an infant's brain. Indeed, the ability to transmit culture - an act that is only part of the human repertoire - may stem from our many automatic and unique perceptual-motor processes that give rise to mental capacities such as belief and culture. Gazzaniga explains how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed, making 'us' the last to know. He shows how what 'we' see is frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving. False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution: how we become who we are.
Michael S. Gazzaniga is David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor and Director of the Program in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives (1989) and Nature's Mind: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language and Intelligence (1994) among many other works.
