UPC: 9780195370782 | Oxford Psychology: The Continuity of Mind (Paperback)

UPC lookup results for: 9780195370782 | Oxford Psychology: The Continuity of Mind (Paperback)

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology with its computer metaphor of the mind is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory cognitive and computational neuroscience connectionism and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. In this book Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence understanding a visual scene or just thinking about the day s events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time i.e. a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your thoughts ) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you even right now can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states. Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception cognition and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out upon closer inspection to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization language comprehension visual perception as well as attention action and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.