Pfaff presents a daring perspective on the long-standing puzzle of what arousal is. He argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain.
Arousal is fundamental to all cognition. It is intuitively obvious, absolutely necessary, but what exactly is it? In Brain Arousal and Information Theory, Donald Pfaff presents a daring perspective on this long-standing puzzle. Pfaff argues that, beneath our mental functions and emotional dispositions, a primitive neuronal system governs arousal. Employing the simple but powerful framework of information theory, Pfaff revolutionizes our understanding of arousal systems in the brain. Starting with a review of the neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, and neurochemical components of arousal, Pfaff asks us to look at the gene networks and neural pathways underlying the brain's arousal systems much as a design engineer would contemplate information systems. This allows Pfaff to postulate that there is a bilaterally symmetric, bipolar system universal among mammals that readies the animal or the human being to respond to stimuli, initiate voluntary locomotion, and react to emotional challenges. Applying his hypothesis to heightened states of arousal--sex and fear--Pfaff shows us how his theory opens new scientific approaches to understanding the structure of brain arousal. A major synthesis of disparate data by a preeminent neuroscientist, Brain Arousal and Information Theory challenges current thinking about cognition and behavior. Whether you subscribe to Pfaff's theory or not, this book will stimulate debate about the nature of arousal itself.
The central theme of this book is the role of energetical factors in the regulation of human information processing activity. This is a restatement of one of the classic problems of psychology - that of acc ounting for motivational or intensive aspects of behaviour, as opposed to structural or directional aspects. The term "energetics" was first used in the 1930's by Freeman, Duffy and others, following Cannon's energy mobilization view of emotion and motivation. The original concept had a limited life, probably because of its unnecessary focus on relativ ely peripheral processes, but it provided the foundations for the con cepts of "arousal" and "activation" which became the popular motivational constructs of the 1950's and 1960's. Now, these too are found wanting. The original assumptions of a unitary, non-specific process based on activation of the brain stem reticular formation have been shown to be misleading. Current work in neurobiology has demonstrated evidence of discrete neurotransmitter systems having quite specific information processing functions, and central roles in the regulation of behaviour. Even the venerable curvilinear relationship between motivation and per formance (the Yerkes-Dodson law) has been shown to be, at best, an unhelpful oversimplification. On a different front psychophysiologists have found complex patterns in the response of different bodily systems to external stressors and to task demands.
Have you ever wondered why are you doing what you are doing? What makes you think the way you think? Can you think differently? Can you do better? This book explores those issues from a unique point of view. It treats the brain as a biological information-handling system. By combining biological facts, psychological observations, and principles of information sciences, the book builds a coherent picture of the relationships between the brain and the mind. In a lively, down-to-earth, yet scientifically sound presentation, the book introduces a few elementary information-handling mechanisms, and shows how the brain builds with them a variety of mental activities including learning, thinking, understanding, perceiving, sexual-drives, and more. Knowing the brain’s basic mechanisms could help us improve ourselves by better understanding our own mind; how it does what it does, what we should accept, and how to change what could be changed.
There has recently been a flurry of theoretical activity in affective neuroscience and neuropsychoanalysis. This book argues that the ability to integrate biological and psychological levels of understanding is inhibited by two important issues. First is the assumption made by most theorists that physical and mental phenomena are essentially different ("the Hard Problem"). Second, is the ambiguity of the widely used "Affect Concept". Ideas about the autonomic nervous system are integrated with those from the author's previous text A Basic Theory of Neuropsychoanalysis. The Realization of Concepts is based on four key assumptions: (1) There is no "Hard Problem"; (2) Motivational theory and cognitive theory can be integrated to create more valid models of body, brain and mind interactions; (3) "Affect Concepts" are superfluous and work to inhibit theory integration; and, (4) Affect theory developed as a "compromise formation" in response to radical reductionism.
The behaviorist credo that animals are devices for translating sensory input into appropriate responses dies hard. The thesis of this pathbreaking book is that the brain is innately constructed to initiate behaviors likely to promote the survival of the species, and to sensitize sensory systems to stimuli required for those behaviors. Animals attend innately to vital stimuli (reinforcers) and the more advanced animals learn to attend to related stimuli as well. Thus, the centrifugal attentional components of sensory systems are as important for learned behavior as the more conventional paths. It is hypothesized that the basal ganglia are an important source of response plans and attentional signals. This reversal of traditional learning theory, along with the rapid expansion of knowledge about the brain, especially that acquired by improved techniques for recording neural activity in behaving animals and people, makes it possible to re-examine some long standing psychological problems. One such problem is how the intention to perform an act selects sensory input from relevant objects and ensures that it alone is delivered to the motor system to control the intended response. This is an aspect of what is sometimes known as the binding problem: how the different features of an observed object are integrated into a unified percept. Another problem that has never been satisfactorily addressed is how the brain stores information concerning temporal order, a requirement for the production of most learned responses, including pronouncing and writing words. A fundamental process, the association between brain activities representing external events, is surprisingly poorly understood at the neural level. Most concepts have multiple associations but the concept is not unduly corrupted by them, and usually only a single appropriate association is aroused at a time. Furthermore, any arbitrary pair of concepts can be instantly associated, apparently requiring an impossibly high degree of neural interconnection. The author suggests a substitute for the reverberating closed neuronal loop as an explanation for the engram (active memory trace or working memory), which may go some way to resolving these difficulties. Shedding new light on enduring questions, The Autonomous Brain will be welcomed by a broad audience of behavioral and brain scientists.
Can the psychodynamics of the mind be correlated with neurodynamic processes in the brain? The book revisits a question that scientists and psychoanalysts have been asking for more than a century. It brings together experts from Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neurology to consider this question.
Originally published in 1986, this stimulating and unorthodox book integrates the major findings of hemispheric research with the larger questions of how the brain stores and transmits information – the ‘brain code’. Norman Cook emphasizes how the two cerebral hemispheres communicate information over the corpus callosum, the largest single nerve tract of the human brain. Excitatory mechanisms are involved in the duplication of information between the hemispheres; in contrast, inhibitory mechanisms are implicated in the production of hemispheric asymmetries and, crucially, in high-level cognitive phenomena such as the right hemisphere’s role in providing the ‘context’ within which left hemispheric verbal information is placed. These callosal mechanisms of information transfer are not only fundamental to the brain code; they are the simplest and most easily demonstrated ways in which the neocortex ‘talks to itself’. The Brain Code demonstrates how popular topics within psychology at the time, such as laterality, hemisphere differences and the psychology of left and right, are central to further progress in understanding the human brain. This book provides stimulating reading for students of psychology, artificial intelligence and neurophysiology, as well as anyone interested in the broader question of how the brain works.
