Product Description

With over four hundred new citations, Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition, embraces the latest findings in this cutting-edge field. A revised chapter two, "The Cellular and Molecular Basis of Cognition," introduces new analysis of the chemical systems that support cognition, outlines the modulation of neuronal transmission during development and disease, and increases coverage of the function of membrane receptors in neurochemistry. An entirely new chapter three, "Gross and Functional Anatomy of Cognition," provides a foundation for working through the functional analysis of cognitive systems in subsequent chapters. The Second Edition also includes extensive coverage of computational modeling, highlighting the ways in which modeling demonstrates the neural mechanisms of cognition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #291927 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 748 pages

About the Author
Michael Gazzaniga (Ph.D., California Institute of Technology) has held positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara; New York University; the State University of New York, Stony Brook; Cornell University Medical College; and the University of California, Davis. Currently, he is the David T. McLaughlin Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth College. Richard Ivry (Ph.D., University of Oregon) has held positions at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and now at the University of California, Berkeley. George Mangun (Ph.D., University of California, San Diego) has taught at Dartmouth Medical School and is now at Duke University.

Customer Reviews

Good survey but needs rewrite and update
This is a well written and comprehensive book by some of the best known researchers. I will not review most of the scientific content as it should be largely unexceptionable from these well known researchers, but provide here a list of typos and comments which I sent to the authors. Those interested in the discussions of consciousness and behavior may wish to see my other reviews.

General comments:
1. This book like thousands of others trips over the vexing gender problem of "his or her" or "he or she" etc. Though it is now politically correct to use both and many authors reverse the sexism by using "she" I find it very distracting especially since "they, them and their" work perfectly in every case with no sexism implied. This simple truth seems to escape everyone. Perhaps one of these days the Kleinefelter's support group may organize and assault all the text writers for not using "his AND her or it's"!

2. Here are some really stunning illusions (when they work) not mentioned here and rarely elsewhere. They are some of the most striking things you can do in your living room that reveal the tenuous nature of our perception. It would be a good way to start discussions of perception, realism, reality and certainty etc in psychology and philosophy.

I'm abstracting it from a Xerox I made some years ago from a book.

First illusion: Sit blindfolded in a chair with Person B sitting on another chair in front of you facing same direction.

Have Person A stand on your right side and tell them "take my right hand and put my index finger on Person B's nose. Then move my hand rhythmically so that the index finger repeatedly taps and strokes their nose, randomly like a Morse code. At the same time, use your left hand to stroke my nose with the same rhythm and timing.--in PERFECT synchrony."
After 30 or 40 seconds you may get the feeling that your nose has stretched out to 3 feet or that you are touching your nose at 3 feet away. The more random the better the illusion. Works about half the time. Author says it shows "that the mechanisms of perception are mainly involved in extracting statistical correlations from the world to create a model that is temporarily useful".

Second illusion: get a dummy rubber hand and then construct a 2 ft by 2 ft cardboard wall and place it on a table in front of you. Put your right hand behind the cardboard and the dummy hand in front of the cardboard. Have someone stroke your hand and the dummy synchronously while you look at the dummy. In a few seconds many people experience the stroking arising from the dummy.

Third illusion: Sit in front of a table and hide your left hand under it. Have someone tap and stroke the surface of the table with their right hand (as you watch) and use their hand simultaneously to stroke your left hand, which is hidden from view. You must not see the movement of their left hand(use cardboard partition if needed). After a minute, you may experience the taps and strokes as coming from under the table surface. "on the few occasions when I accidentally made a much longer stroke on the table surface than on the subjects hidden hand, the person exclaimed that his hand felt lengthened or stretched to absurd proportions."


CORRECTIONS AND COMMENTS ON THE TEXT
P 98 middle --free FROM interference
P 151 line 1--SUPRANUCLEAR
P 159 rt col middle nerve fibers INNERVATING the
P186 legend fig 5.24 despite HIS...HE clearly
P256 fig 7.7 ARTICULATORY
P279 fig 7.28. what are the black areas in the scans?
P284 fig legend. Change SOLID line to RED line and DASHED line to BLUE line.
P310 left col. Middle connection syndrome now KNOWN
P326 left col middle--the planum TEMPORALE'S
P334 MILESTONES left col. Bottom PHENOMENA
P359 fig 9.38 EXEMPLARS misspelled 4 times. Fig legend bottom -characteristic OF left..
P359 rt col bottom--in a single FOCUS..
P367 fig 9.43 says -"completely crossed", but left col. Bottom says "almost all"
P418 top left--rats with striatal lesions{do not?} produce.... What does this mean?
P441 rt col middle, pg 442 fig. legend--auditorally--auditorially is more common and AURALLY sounds sweeter.
P463 fig. 11.32--figs reversed?--if not then it's not clear what is being shown.
P471 left col middle--Maybe it was not published when this book was written, but it's now clear babies have a diving reflex -they hold their breath and start to swim--when put underwater. This is shown beautifully in one sequence in the BBC series "The Human Body".
P491 insert rt col middle--omit "six to eight" fetuses..
P503 left col middle--eliminate Semicolon ---- birds; wings make sense.
And third, a device's structure is explained when one...
P506 top.--I'm sure they will get nailed for this one and I too just don't see why the phylogeneticists view is foolish. Nobody says chimps MUST have language, only that it is reasonable to look for its precursors there.
P511. Since this book so nicely includes material on evolution and as long as they are telling the moth story they might as well tell the moth mite story. I read it over 30 years ago so it may have changed by now but this is what I recall. Their ears are infected by mites but the mites seem to have evolved to stay put on one ear. Presumably they were selected for this as a one eared moth might still escape bats.
P524 rt col middle the exponent of 10 dropped down here to read 1010.
Also the comment by Chomsky seems unclear as it could be taken to say that it IS selected which is not what they say he says.

P528 left col bottom--people certainly DO try to.... And Searle does NOT say we never understand consciousness etc, only as you note in the next sentence that we will not with our current descriptors. One point is that we don't even know how to recognize what a explanation or description of consiousness, thinking etc, looks like.

P530 Searle refers to Dennet's view that our mental life is illusory (or something else which amounts to it) as "an intellectual pathology" and he reviewed Dennet's book as "Consciousness Explained Away". . Yes, I know he rails about Searle not responding to his criticism of the Chinese Room but Searle has been answering countless objections for about 30 years (eg, in Hofstadter and Dennet's `The Mind's I' (1981)) and says there is nothing new to answer. The Chinese Room is the most famous paper in modern philosophy. In it Searle shows how it is clear, from a strictly logical point of view, that digital computation is not the same as thinking and further that we don't even know how to recognize a process as thinking when it's not being done by a person. No, the Turing test does not solve this problem. He is NOT saying it's impossible to make machines that think and points out that we are putative biocomputers that think. These are extremely simple logical points but they escape most people. For further discussion of all these issues and how Wittgenstein anticipated them brilliantly some 75 years ago please see my review of Hoftstadter's "I am a Strange Loop".

I go for a dip in Wittgenstein when philosophy and psychology bog down trying to explain the mind (ie., always)--still to me the best cure for philosophy, though not an easy study. Also, since they mention color language, if you have never read it I recommend Wittgenstein's "Remarks on Colour" for the most insightful discussion of the use of color words I've ever seen. Sadly the author of the MIT Encyclopedia article on color (and nearly all other discussions of color) are unaware of it but of course this is part of the collective amnesia for the work of our greatest natural psychologist.

P535 I know about Purkinje, eyetrackers and stabilization and have seen this instrument in operation, but the details of the operation of the eyetracker and the exptl. technique still seem opaque.

P549 Summary--John Searle(and I) do not agree that consciousness is a great mystery anymore than wetness is a great mystery of water. Consciousness is just a property of the brain as wetness is of water. See the papers on his web page (as of 05-2005) at UC Berkeley on his philosophy of biological naturalism or any of his recent books on the mind and the brain-- marvelous antidotes for reductionism, holism and philosophy in general.

Excellent
Research in cognitive neuroscience has exploded in the last two decades, mostly due to the rise of experimental techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission topography, but also due to the ability now to simulate neuronal behavior computationally. This book, written by leading experts in the field is written for the student in mind, so anyone with a strong curiosity about what has been accomplished in cognitive neuroscience up till now will gain a lot from reading the book. The study of the brain is fascinating and there is every indication that a thorough understanding of cognitive processes, including the nature of consciousness, will be achieved in this century.

Just a small sample of some of the questions that arise from the reading of the book include:
1. What is the cause of akinetopsia, i.e. loss of motion perception?
2. What is the relationship between learning and memory?
3. How limited is short-term memory and where are sensory memories stored?
4. Why were `working memory' models proposed and what evidence is there to support them?
5. What is the difference between declarative and nondeclarative memories?
6. What is the connection between amnesia and the medial temporal lobe?
7. Just how accurate are the experimental techniques of PET and fMRI?
8. Is damage to the hippocampus sufficient to block the formation of new long-term memories?
9. Does damage to the medial temporal lobe and diencephalic memory systems affect both episodic and semantic memory?
10. What brain systems support procedural memory?
11. Is there any evidence that brain lesions can affect the perceptual representation system but leaving the declarative memory untouched?
12. How much is known about the molecular mechanisms of synaptic strengthening in long-term potentiation?
13. Just how much is known about the neural organization of language?
14. What evidence is there for domain-specific knowledge systems that are evolutionarily adapted?
15. What is the nature of the segmentation problem and what is its relevance in the neuronal modeling of language use and acquisition?
16. Is reading represented by a specialized input system?
17. What are the differences between the modular and interactive models of language comprehension?
18. What evidence is there for the garden-path model of syntactic analysis?
19. What is the nature of agrammatic aphasia and what causes it?
20. What is semantic paraphasia what causes it?
21. What is the nature of Broca's aphasia?
22. What connection, if any, is there between the size of the corpus callosum and autism?
23. Why, from an evolutionary perspective, is it advantageous to have hemispheric specialization?
24. How does the frequency hypothesis explain hemispheric asymmetries in visual perception?
25. How effective are the computational models of visual system?
26. What experiments indicate that cortical cell number cannot by itself fully explain human intelligence?
27. In contrast to nonhuman animals, why do humans try to find patterns in sequences of events, even though they are informed explicitly that the sequences are random?
28. What evidence exists for a `generative assembling device' in the left hemisphere?
29. How are movement plans represented?
30. What is the function of "mirror cells?"
31. To what degree does learning play in producing purposeful actions?
32. Do representations within the motor cortex change as a function of practice?
33. What is the timing hypothesis of the role of the cerebellum in motor learning?
34. What causes Parkinson's disease?
35. What are the executive functions?
36. What is the difference between working memory and associative memory?
37. How is information activated and maintained in working memory?
38. What is the nature of recency memory?
39. What is the dynamic filtering mechanism and what experimental evidence is there to support it?
40. What are schema control units and what role do they play in response selection?
41. How can emotion be defined in order to carry out a neuroscientific science of emotion?
42. What role does the amygdala play in the processing of emotional stimuli?
43. Are the neural systems of emotion and cognition independent? Interdependent?
44. What is a somatic marker and what role does it play in decision-making?
45. What neural systems are responsible for controlling facial expressions?
46. What is genetic specificity and genetic pleiotropy?
47. How can one determine whether a neuronal structure or behavior is functionally significant to the organism in the environment to which is adapted or whether it is an epiphenomenon of evolution?
48. What is the role, if any, of subconscious processing?
49. What is the nature of access-consciousness?
50. How close are neuroscientists to a science of consciousness?

Not for those without background
This book is not intended for the general reader, reader with cellular neuroscience background, but has a target audience of advanced undergraduate or graduate level students with relevant background. Also would be useful for the psychology professional without specific or with dated cognitive neuroscience background, or others intending a research or applied clinical career in the area. Appropriate background would necessarily be at least an undergraduate course in cognitive psychology, with additional help provided by biological psychology or a medical professional in neurology. Discussions of principles and mechanisms are at a "functional machinery" level and thus would not make sense to those without some previous training in those principles. It just isn't a basic text, thus, no glossary of basic terms is included. Yes, the material is both abstract and complex, but so is brain function, and we are just beginning to learn. There are very, very few textbooks that survey this area which only became a separate field of study sometime around 1986. Other reading material in the field consists entirely of professional level chapters in compiled and edited texts. The only other broad survey text that I know of is Marie Banich's book on the related area of Cognitive Neuropsychology.