This is the second volume of a projected three-volume set on the subject of innateness. The volume is highly interdisciplinary, and addresses such question as: To what extent are mature cognitive capacities a reflection of particular cultures and to what extent are they a product of innate elements? How do innate elements interact with culture to achieve mature cognitive capacities? How do minds generate and shape cultures? How are cultures processed by minds? The volume will be of great importance to anyone interested in the interplay between culture and the innate mind.
"What makes you the way you are--and what makes each of us different from everyone else? In Innate, leading neuroscientist and popular science blogger Kevin Mitchell traces human diversity and individual differences to their deepest level: in the wiring of our brains. Deftly guiding us through important new research, including his own groundbreaking work, he explains how variations in the way our brains develop before birth strongly influence our psychology and behavior throughout our lives, shaping our personality, intelligence, sexuality, and even the way we perceive the world. We all share a genetic program for making a human brain, and the program for making a brain like yours is specifically encoded in your DNA. But, as Mitchell explains, the way that program plays out is affected by random processes of development that manifest uniquely in each person, even identical twins. The key insight of Innate is that the combination of these developmental and genetic variations creates innate differences in how our brains are wired--differences that impact all aspects of our psychology--and this insight promises to transform the way we see the interplay of nature and nurture. Innate also explores the genetic and neural underpinnings of disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy, and how our understanding of these conditions is being revolutionized. In addition, the book examines the social and ethical implications of these ideas and of new technologies that may soon offer the means to predict or manipulate human traits. Compelling and original, Innate will change the way you think about why and how we are who we are."--Provided by the publisher.
This is the third volume of a three-volume set on The Innate Mind. The extent to which cognitive structures, processes, and contents are innate is one of the central questions concerning the nature of the mind, with important implications for debates throughout the human sciences. By bringing together the top nativist scholars in philosophy, psychology, and allied disciplines these volumes provide a comprehensive assessment of nativist thought and a definitive reference point for future nativist inquiry. The Innate Mind: Volume 3: Foundations and the Future, concerns a variety of foundational issues as well as questions about the direction of future nativist research. It addresses such questions as: What is innateness? Is it a confused notion? What is at stake in debates between nativists and empiricists? What is the relationship between genes and innateness? How do innate structures and learned information interact to produce adult forms of cognition, e.g. about number, and how does such learning take place? What innate abilities underlie the creative aspect of language, and of creative cognition generally? What are the innate foundations of human motivation, and of human moral cognition? In the course of their discussions, many of the contributors pose the question (whether explicitly or implicitly): Where next for nativist research? Together, these three volumes provide the most intensive and richly cross-disciplinary investigation of nativism ever undertaken. They point the way toward a synthesis of nativist work that promises to provide a powerful picture of our minds and their place in the natural order.
The intention of Pure Conscious Energy is to reconnect you with the truth that you are a Spiritual Being. Within its pages you'll find The Chart of Intentions and Characteristics of the Composite Being, which was created as a tool to help identify the higher levels of consciousness and truth while bringing understanding and clarity to negative habits or characteristics of lower confusions. Using this will help you free the condensed energy and confusion from your consciousness via analytical processing. Increasing your consciousness and acting with clear thinking and wisdom, will enable you to move up to higher states of understanding and knowingness.Over the course of this book, you will travel a path towards friendship with your own mind. More than that, your consciousness will become like a compassionate older sibling taking your hand, guiding you with knowledge through areas of confusion and uncertainty. This will help you reach the innate spiritual truths within and raise your vibrational energy to live more in the "now" while increasing your imagination to discover and live your life's purpose.
Explains what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life.
Unmatched in the quality of its world-renowned contributors, this multidisciplinary companion serves as both a course text and a reference book across the broad spectrum of issues of concern to cognitive science.
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
Do newborns think? Do they know that "three" is greater than "two"? Do they prefer "right" to "wrong"? Laypeople hold strong beliefs on such topics. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect our understanding of ourselves and others, and shape our thinking about topics such as mental disorders, free will, and the afterlife. But many of these stories are misguided. We, the storytellers, are blind. How could we get it so wrong? In a novel provocative theory, Berent proposes that our errors emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick. Our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself.
