Origins of the Modern Mind

Author: Merlin Donald
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674253701
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Book Description
This bold and brilliant book asks the ultimate question of the life sciences: How did the human mind acquire its incomparable power? In seeking the answer, Merlin Donald traces the evolution of human culture and cognition from primitive apes to artificial intelligence, presenting an enterprising and original theory of how the human mind evolved from its presymbolic form.

Law and the Modern Mind

Author: Susanna L. Blumenthal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674048935
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence. Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons. In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.

Storytelling

Author: Christian Salmon
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784786608
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
The narrative spell cast over politics and society Politics is no longer the art of the possible, but of the fictive. Its aim is not to change the world as it exists, but to affect the way that it is perceived. In Storytelling Christian Salmon looks at the twenty-first-century hijacking of creative imagination, anatomizing the timeless human desire for narrative form, and how this desire is abused by the marketing mechanisms that bolster politicians and their products: luxury brands trade on embellished histories, managers tell stories to motivate employees, soldiers in Iraq train on Hollywood-conceived computer games, and spin doctors construct political lives as if they were a folk epic. This “storytelling machine” is masterfully unveiled by Salmon, and is shown to be more effective and insidious as a means of oppression than anything dreamed up by Orwell.

iBrain

Author: Gary Small
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061340332
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
Their insights are extraordinary, their behaviors unusual. Their brains—shaped by the era of microprocessors, access to limitless information, and 24-hour news and communication—are remapping, retooling, and evolving. They're not superhuman. They're your twenty-something coworkers, your children, and your competition. Are you keeping up? In iBrain, Dr. Gary Small, one of America's leading neuroscientists and experts on brain function and behavior, explores how technology's unstoppable march forward has altered the way young minds develop, function, and interpret information. iBrain reveals a new evolution catalyzed by technological advancement and its future implications: Where do you fit in on the evolutionary chain? What are the professional, social, and political impacts of this new brain evolution? How must you adapt and at what price? While high-tech immersion can accelerate learning and boost creativity, it also has its glitches, among them the meteoric rise in ADD diagnoses, increased social isolation, and Internet addiction. To compete and thrive in the age of brain evolution, and to avoid these potential drawbacks, we must adapt, and iBrain—with its Technology Toolkit—equips all of us with the tools and strategies needed to close the brain gap.

Law and the Modern Mind

Author: Jerome Frank
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 135150956X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the courtroom.

The Making of the Modern Mind

Author: John Herman Randall
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231041423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 398

Book Description
Surveys the intellectual background of man from medieval times through the Renaissance to modern times.

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

Author: George Makari
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393248690
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 547

Book Description
A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.

The Modern Mind

Author: Peter Watson
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062039121
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 786

Book Description
From Freud to Babbitt, from Animal Farm to Sartre to the Great Society, from the Theory of Relativity to counterculture to Kosovo, The Modern Mind is encyclopedic, covering the major writers, artists, scientists, and philosophers who produced the ideas by which we live. Peter Watson has produced a fluent and engaging narrative of the intellectual tradition of the twentieth century, and the men and women who created it.

Mindlift

Author: Kasper Van Der Meulen
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946697080
Category : Distraction (Psychology)
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
"The modern mind: We live in a wonderful era of abundance, high-speed information and hyper-connection, but it also faces us with the challenges of mass-distraction, negative stress and analysis paralysis. In this book you will learn how to leverage the opportunities of the modern world into a lifestyle of laser focus, masterful mindfulness and personal freedom."--Page 4 of cover.

Makers of the Modern Mind

Author: Thomas P. Neill
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781021171719
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description