Awaken to Superconsciousness PDF Download

Author: Donald J. Walters
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120817494
Category : Meditation
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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ABOUT THE BOOK:Awaken to Superconsciousness provides easy, gentle guidance to help beginners quickly feel and benefits of meditation and allows long-time practitioners to break through blocks and deepen their experience. Drawing upon decades of experi

Author: Leonard Mlodinow
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307472256
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Drunkard’s Walk, a startling, eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world. “Mlodinow plunges into the realm of the unconscious mind accompanied by the latest scientific research ... [with] plenty of his trademark humor.” —Los Angeles Times Over the past two decades of neurological research, it has become increasingly clear that the way we experience the world—our perception, behavior, memory, and social judgment—is largely driven by the mind's subliminal processes and not by the conscious ones, as we have long believed. In Subliminal, Leonard Mlodinow employs his signature concise, accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects to unravel the complexities of the subliminal mind. In the process he shows the many ways it influences how we misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates; how we misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions; and how we misremember important events—along the way, changing our view of ourselves and the world around us.

Author: Stanislas Dehaene
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698151402
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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WINNER OF THE 2014 BRAIN PRIZE From the acclaimed author of Reading in the Brain and How We Learn, a breathtaking look at the new science that can track consciousness deep in the brain How does our brain generate a conscious thought? And why does so much of our knowledge remain unconscious? Thanks to clever psychological and brain-imaging experiments, scientists are closer to cracking this mystery than ever before. In this lively book, Stanislas Dehaene describes the pioneering work his lab and the labs of other cognitive neuroscientists worldwide have accomplished in defining, testing, and explaining the brain events behind a conscious state. We can now pin down the neurons that fire when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information and understand the crucial role unconscious computations play in how we make decisions. The emerging theory enables a test of consciousness in animals, babies, and those with severe brain injuries. A joyous exploration of the mind and its thrilling complexities, Consciousness and the Brain will excite anyone interested in cutting-edge science and technology and the vast philosophical, personal, and ethical implications of finally quantifying consciousness.

Author: Chris Paley
Publisher: Coronet
ISBN: 1444779729
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Your life is dominated by your unconscious mind: by thoughts you're unaware of and movements you don't realise you are making. Words, colours, mannerisms and other cues you don't realise are affecting you, change what you think. The confidence you have in your ability to reason and to consciously choose what to do is caused by a series of illusions that scientists are only just beginning to understand. The discovery of these illusions will change the way we see ourselves more than the discoveries of Darwin and Copernicus. Unthink explores the unconscious decisions we make, and covers a variety of topics, ranging from how we choose politicians and romantic partners to more abstract subjects such as whether we can consciously decide to move our fingers. The counter-intuitive observations that Chris makes in the book include: · If you want someone to fancy you, wear red and meet them somewhere frightening. · When waitresses repeat customers' orders back to them instead of just saying 'yes' they receive bigger tips. · To reduce your shopping bill, start at the beer and snacks end of the store and work backwards. · If you sit someone in an upright chair when you give them good news they will be prouder of their achievements. · Having a picture of your family on your desk might make you work harder, but you'll be rattier when you get home! Chris Paley shows us how we can understand ourselves and others better, by having a greater understanding of the way that the unconscious mind has an impact of the way we live our lives.

Author: Benjamin Kissin
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461321875
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
For almost a century now, since Freud described the basic motivations and Pavlov the basic mechanisms of human behavior, we have had a reasonable concept of the forces that drive us. Only recently have we gained any real insight into how the brain really works to produce such behavior. The new developments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience have taught us things about the function of the brain that would have been inconceivable even ten years ago. Yet, there still remains a tremendous gap between the two studies-human behavior and brain function-a gap which often seems irrec oncilable in view of the basic differences in the methodologies and approaches of the two fields. Students of behavior are frequently disinterested in the underlying neu rophysiology while neurophysiologists tend to consider the concepts of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists too vague and theoretical to be applicable to their own more limited schemata. Several valiant attempts have been made by experimentalists to develop a theoretical context in which behavior is described, not separately from brain function but rather as its direct outgrowth. This present work is still another attempt to develop a theoretical system which, given the limitations of our present knowledge, as completely as possible, the underlying brain mechanisms that influ will describe ence and determine human behavior. The main emphasis of this work, however, will be not on normal behavior but rather on more neurotic manifestations.

Author: Kuniyoshi L. Sakai
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
ISBN: 2889196275
Category : Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
Interaction between language and cognition remains an unsolved scientific problem. What are the differences in neural mechanisms of language and cognition? Why do children acquire language by the age of six, while taking a lifetime to acquire cognition? What is the role of language and cognition in thinking? Is abstract cognition possible without language? Is language just a communication device, or is it fundamental in developing thoughts? Why are there no animals with human thinking but without human language? Combinations even among 100 words and 100 objects (multiple words can represent multiple objects) exceed the number of all the particles in the Universe, and it seems that no amount of experience would suffice to learn these associations. How does human brain overcome this difficulty? Since the 19th century we know about involvement of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in language. What new knowledge of language and cognition areas has been found with fMRI and other brain imaging methods? Every year we know more about their anatomical and functional/effective connectivity. What can be inferred about mechanisms of their interaction, and about their functions in language and cognition? Why does the human brain show hemispheric (i.e., left or right) dominance for some specific linguistic and cognitive processes? Is understanding of language and cognition processed in the same brain area, or are there differences in language-semantic and cognitive-semantic brain areas? Is the syntactic process related to the structure of our conceptual world? Chomsky has suggested that language is separable from cognition. On the opposite, cognitive and construction linguistics emphasized a single mechanism of both. Neither has led to a computational theory so far. Evolutionary linguistics has emphasized evolution leading to a mechanism of language acquisition, yet proposed approaches also lead to incomputable complexity. There are some more related issues in linguistics and language education as well. Which brain regions govern phonology, lexicon, semantics, and syntax systems, as well as their acquisitions? What are the differences in acquisition of the first and second languages? Which mechanisms of cognition are involved in reading and writing? Are different writing systems affect relations between language and cognition? Are there differences in language-cognition interactions among different language groups (such as Indo-European, Chinese, Japanese, Semitic) and types (different degrees of analytic-isolating, synthetic-inflected, fused, agglutinative features)? What can be learned from sign languages? Rizzolatti and Arbib have proposed that language evolved on top of earlier mirror-neuron mechanism. Can this proposal answer the unknown questions about language and cognition? Can it explain mechanisms of language-cognition interaction? How does it relate to known brain areas and their interactions identified in brain imaging? Emotional and conceptual contents of voice sounds in animals are fused. Evolution of human language has demanded splitting of emotional and conceptual contents and mechanisms, although language prosody still carries emotional content. Is it a dying-off remnant, or is it fundamental for interaction between language and cognition? If language and cognitive mechanisms differ, unifying these two contents requires motivation, hence emotions. What are these emotions? Can they be measured? Tonal languages use pitch contours for semantic contents, are there differences in language-cognition interaction among tonal and atonal languages? Are emotional differences among cultures exclusively cultural, or also depend on languages? Interaction of language and cognition is thus full of mysteries, and we encourage papers addressing any aspect of this topic.

Author: Stanislas Dehaene
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262541312
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Empirical and theoretical foundations of a cognitive neuroscience of consciousness.

Author: Daniel M. Wegner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262290553
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 743

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A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547527543
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Author: Zoltan Torey
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262527103
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
An account of the emergence of the mind: how the brain acquired self-awareness, functional autonomy, the ability to think, and the power of speech. How did the human mind emerge from the collection of neurons that makes up the brain? How did the brain acquire self-awareness, functional autonomy, language, and the ability to think, to understand itself and the world? In this volume in the Essential Knowledge series, Zoltan Torey offers an accessible and concise description of the evolutionary breakthrough that created the human mind. Drawing on insights from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and linguistics, Torey reconstructs the sequence of events by which Homo erectus became Homo sapiens. He describes the augmented functioning that underpins the emergent mind—a new (“off-line”) internal response system with which the brain accesses itself and then forms a selection mechanism for mentally generated behavior options. This functional breakthrough, Torey argues, explains how the animal brain's “awareness” became self-accessible and reflective—that is, how the human brain acquired a conscious mind. Consciousness, unlike animal awareness, is not a unitary phenomenon but a composite process. Torey's account shows how protolanguage evolved into language, how a brain subsystem for the emergent mind was built, and why these developments are opaque to introspection. We experience the brain's functional autonomy, he argues, as free will. Torey proposes that once life began, consciousness had to emerge—because consciousness is the informational source of the brain's behavioral response. Consciousness, he argues, is not a newly acquired “quality,” “cosmic principle,” “circuitry arrangement,” or “epiphenomenon,” as others have argued, but an indispensable working component of the living system's manner of functioning.