The Mind's Past [Hardcover]
Author: these sellers | Language: English | ISBN: 0520213203 | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Mind's Past
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Direct download links available The Mind's Past for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
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's 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.
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's 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.
- Hardcover: 216 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 7, 1998)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520213203
- ISBN-13: 978-0520213203
- Product Dimensions: 7 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,456,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
This book takes a look at long held assumptions about human consciousness, and examines them in the light of modern empirical neuroscience. It examines the processes of perception and the work of the left brain's "interpreter." It's an uncommon look at "common sense."
The first chapter of the book examines the "Fictional Self," and continues to weave this thread of thought throughout the book. What fascinated me most about this line of thought was that it paralleled ancient Eastern thought about the illusion of individual reality. However, Dr. Gazzaniga's book does not draw on these ancient traditions, and it is up to the reader to figure them out.
Dr. Gazzaniga writes, "... the primate brain prepares cells for decisive action long before we are even thinking about making a decision! These automatic processes sometimes get tricked and create illusions - blatant demonstrations of these automatic devices that operate so efficiently that no one can do anything to stop them. They run their course and we see them in action; as a consequence we have to conclude that they are a big part of us." p. 20
In The Bhagavad-Gita it says, " As the ignorant act with attachment to actions, Arjuna, so wise men should act with detachment to preserve the world." (3rd Teaching, 25, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller) Just like "The Mind's Past," The Bhagavad-Gita points out the illusion of willful action. Dr. Gazzaniga's empirical observations have a poetic parallel in The Bhagavad-Gita.
The book also examines the dual functions of perception, the flow of perceptual information to the parietal and temporal lobes simultaneously, one prepares the body to act within reality, and the other constructs an illusionary perception of reality.
This lightly told, but hardly frivolous, study of the mind/brain refutes many long-held notions of what comprises the conscious mind. Gazzinga's approach is an attempt to inform us all of the real status of "self." He contends the "self" - hence, "free will" is a conceit. We pretend to have consciousness through our desire to establish identity, but the brain has its own, hidden, mechanisms of which we are only now becoming aware. He stresses the evolutionary roots of our minds, roots which may not compel behaviour, but certainly drive it with forces we fail to perceive readily. It's an amazingly complete work in spite of its brevity, rewarding to anyone opening its pages.
Gazzaniga is a clinical researcher, not a field worker. This doesn't impede his stressing an evolutionary development for how our minds work. Gazzaniga posits an "interpreter" as residing within our left brains. The distinctive roles of the left and right halves of the brain have been the subject of intensive research during the past years, but his assessment has some novelty. It is rather more than the classical "Cartesian Theatre" which has held sway in the minds of many psychologists and philosophers over the years. Gazzaniga's "interpreter" outperforms the role of "observer" postulated by Descartes. It has moved from Descartes' pineal gland to the left cortex. In Gazzaniga's view, the "interpreter" has a more active role, even powered to stimulate activity in sensory areas, previously thought to be wholly reactive. This device is rooted in our animal ancestors, living in a dangerous environment, needing to predict events for survival and reproduction.
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