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Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts by [Stanislas Dehaene]

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Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts Kindle Edition

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 496 ratings

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*Starred Review* For 15 years, professor of cognitive psychology and science writer Dehaene (Reading in the Brain, 2009) and his team have been working to identify and understand patterns of brain activity, or “signatures of consciousness.” He now brings us up to speed on the whole of consciousness research in this exciting delineation of the scientific breakthroughs, including the advent of brain-imaging technologies, that have illuminated the brain’s astonishingly complicated anatomy and intensely intricate, lightning-fast processes. Dehaene recounts experiments involving visual illusions and semantic processing that reveal key facts about the brain’s management of the incessant stimuli bombardment and ponders the evolution of our all-important “language of thought.” An excellent teacher with a gift for vivid analogies, Dehaene writes that “consciousness is like the spokesperson in a large institution . . . with a staff of a hundred billion neurons” issuing briefs that tell us what we need to know moment by moment. He then explains his and his colleagues’ groundbreaking theory about the “global neuronal workspace,” where information is made “available to the rest of the brain,” wowing us with descriptions of our pyramidal neurons and their spiny dendrites and the discovery that each neuron “cares” about such specific stimuli as “faces, hands, ­objects.” A stunning examination of the “exquisite biological machinery” that has made us an animal unlike any other. --Donna Seaman --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

This book's spunky writing and popular topic should have made transforming it into an appealing audio an easy proposition. But David Drummond's repetitive tonal patterns give the production a flat quality that falls short of making this title the "joyous exploration of the mind" that the publisher claims it to be. Drummond's phrasing is always clear, but he repeats the same pitch sequences again and again. However, the author's boyish enthusiasm for this kind of psychological inquiry saves the production and helps it deliver a stirring look at how today's scientists are parsing the experience of being conscious. T.W. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00DMCVXO0
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (January 30, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 30, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 8980 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 334 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 496 ratings

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Professor Stanislas Dehaene holds the Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology at the Collége de France, Paris. He directs the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit at NeuroSpin in Saclay, south of Paris, France's advanced brain imaging research center. He is also the president of the Scientific Council for Education of the French ministry of education.

Stanislas Dehaene is recognized as one of Europe’s most prominent brain scientists. He is well known for his pioneering studies of “the number sense”, the innate brain circuits that we share with other primates and that allow us to understand numbers and mathematics. He is also a specialist of reading and uncovered the function of the ''visual word form area'', a left-hemisphere region that specializes for letters when we learn to read. Those discoveries have fostered his strong interest for learning and education. With his wife Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, he has made fundamental discoveries on infants’ brain organization for language, and on how education to mathematics, reading and bilingualism shape the human brain. He has also observed some of the earliest “signatures of consciousness", i.e. patterns of brain responses that are unique to conscious processing and can be used to diagnose coma and vegetative-state patients.

Prof. Dehaene has accumulated numerous awards and prizes. In 2014, he was awarded the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize, a 1-million € award which is considered the Nobel prize in the field (with G. Rizzolatti and T. Robbins). He is also a member of eight academies: the US National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the French Académie des Sciences, the British Academy, Academia Europae, the Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium, and the European Molecular Biology Organization EMBO.

With an h-index of 173, Prof. Dehaene is a Thomas Reuters highly cited researcher. His research has been featured in numerous publications including a full-length portrait in the New Yorker (“The Numbers Guy”, by Jim Holt, 2008). He is the author of five books, three television documentaries, and over 400 scientific publications in journals such as Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and PNAS. 70 of his articles were cited more than 500 times.

His books are a huge success, have been translated in fifteen languages, and several have received awards for best science writing:

• The Number Sense (1999): Jean Rostand award

• Reading in the Brain (2009): A Washington Post science book of the year

• Consciousness and the brain (2013): Grand Prix RTL-Lire for Best science book of the year

• How we Learn: why brains learn better than any machine… for now. (2020) Penguin Viking. Book of the year, the French Society for Neurology.

• Seeing the mind (2023). To appear at MIT Press.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
496 global ratings

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Philip Bowles
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book by a pioneer in the field
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on May 27, 2022
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HamaNeko
4.0 out of 5 stars 脳のバックグラウンド処理、大変参考になった
Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on September 18, 2019
colin benjamin
3.0 out of 5 stars A journey through the labs of clever consc iuous
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on February 28, 2021
Samuel McGowan
5.0 out of 5 stars A good book
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 19, 2020
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Dee
5.0 out of 5 stars Blows a lot of hippy consciousness crap out of the water
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 26, 2017
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