Description

Although we no longer live in the relative simplicity of the Jurassic age, and even though we are not aware of them, primitive mammalian brain that developed in that era still live on inside our skulls and remain crucial to our daily functions. The challenges we face today in the information age--how to process the vastly greater, more varied and quickly changing inputs we receive--are very different from those that our ancestors faced during the Jurassic age. As we struggle to process overwhelming amounts of information, we may sometimes ask whether our brains can change to help us adapt. In fact, our brains have always changed gradually, so the questions we should ask are really how our brains will change, and whether we will be able to take full advantage of the changes, perhaps even enhance them, to help us keep up with the accelerating evolution of machines. To understand how our brains will change, we need to understand how they evolved in the first place, as well as how the interactions of the resulting brain structures, including the relics of primitive mammalian and even reptilian processes, influence how we think and act.

In Mind from Body , Don Tucker, one of the most original thinkers about organic information processing, provides a fascinating analysis of how our brains have become what they are today and speculates intriguingly about what they could be tomorrow. He presents important research that explains how personal experience creates the emotional and motivational bases of each of our thoughts, even though we are usually not aware that it is happening. Tucker shows that in exploring how these bodily thought processes still determine how we react to the world and make decisions, we can become more rational in our actions, free ourselves from fruitless or even self-destructive patterns of behavior, become more efficient, and perhaps even wiser. By combining the most up-to-date scientific thought and hands-on experimental results, expressed clearly and compellingly, along with a story of hypothetical decision-making, Tucker explicates what is happening behind our thought processes as our minds struggle to maintain the pace of the information age.

Reviews

"Tucker uses psychological narratives of subjective experience to light up the brain's workings and neuroscientific accounts of the brain to illuminate the mental depths hidden within everyday experience. What results is an original and compelling synthesis of psychology and neuroscience that reveals the bodily roots and neural ramifications of mental life. Engaging and informative, Mind from Body steps toward a new kind of self-knowledge--an experiential neuropsychology of the human mind." --Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto and author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

"To paraphrase many contemporary phenomenologists, the mind is what the brain-body does. Tucker explains the brain as the creative conductor of the orchestral parts of the body, including itself. Writing for beginning psychology students in adolescence and early maturity, he describes with masterly clarity how the brain constructs information by organizing its sensory, motor, and autonomic organs in accord with its own dimensions: top-down, left-right, inside-out, and hierarchically, from reflexes to scholarly reflections." --Walter J. Freeman, Professor of the Graduate School Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Division of Neurobiology, University of California at Berkeley

"This book is an original, bold, and extremely creative contribution to the growing field of cognitive neuroscience that focuses on the emergence of mind and thought in organism-environment interactions. It should take its place among the works of people like Antonio Damasio, Gerald Edelman, and Joseph LeDoux--neuroscientists who understand the important philosophical implications of recent brain science." --Mark Johnson, Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon

"This book is a delightful romp through insights and evidence, held together by a powerful theory of brain functioning. Tucker portrays the brain as an organ of subjectivity that creates experience through its mechanisms of motivation and memory. The writing is accessible, agile, and often humorous, while remaining intellectually rigorous. Tucker's vision of the bodily basis of mind is larger and more courageous than anything we expected. For both the scientist and the interested lay person, this book feels like the intellectual adventure of the year." --Marc D. Lewis, Professor, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto

"Tucker uses psychological narratives of subjective experience to light up the brain's workings and neuroscientific accounts of the brain to illuminate the mental depths hidden within everyday experience. What results is an original and compelling synthesis of psychology and neuroscience that reveals the bodily roots and neural ramifications of mental life. Engaging and informative, Mind from Body steps toward a new kind of self-knowledge--an experiential neuropsychology of the human mind." --Evan Thompson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto and author of Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

"In a clear, easy and down-to-earth style that will appeal to students, Don Tucker, a pioneer of human brain recording, explains and enlightens how body and mind are inextricably connected. Tucker grounds the mind both in the brain's 'deep' mechanisms that regulate our bodily needs and urges and the 'surface' networks of the cerebral cortex that connect us to our world. Between these boundaries spanning the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective, meaningful information takes form. Mind from Body is a reconciliation of body and mind that is sure to draw the attention of philosophers and neuroscientists alike." --J. A. Scott Kelso, author of Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior and co-author of The Complementary Nature

"In a clear, easy and down-to-earth style that will appeal to students, Don Tucker, a pioneer of human brain recording, explains and enlightens how body and mind are inextricably connected. Tucker grounds the mind both in the brain's 'deep' mechanisms that regulate our bodily needs and urges and the 'surface' networks of the cerebral cortex that connect us to our world. Between these boundaries spanning the internal and the external, the subjective and the objective, meaningful information takes form. Mind from Body is a reconciliation of body and mind that is sure to draw the attention of philosophers and neuroscientists alike." --J. A. Scott Kelso, author of Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of Brain and Behavior and co-author of The Complementary Nature

"This book is a delightful romp through insights and evidence, held together by a powerful theory of brain functioning. Tucker portrays the brain as an organ of subjectivity that creates experience through its mechanisms of motivation and memory. The writing is accessible, agile, and often humorous, while remaining intellectually rigorous. Tucker's vision of the bodily basis of mind is larger and more courageous than anything we expected. For both the scientist and the interested lay person, this book feels like the intellectual adventure of the year." --Marc D. Lewis, Professor, Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto

Product Details

336 pages; 18 halftones; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-531698-8ISBN10: 0-19-531698-3

About the Author(s)