Brain Arousal and Information Theory

Brain Arousal and Information Theory
Author: Donald W PFAFF
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2009-06-30
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0674042107

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.

From the Couch to the Lab

From the Couch to the Lab
Author: Aikaterini Fotopoulou
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 507
Release: 2012-05-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 019960052X

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.

How Brain Arousal Mechanisms Work

How Brain Arousal Mechanisms Work
Author: Donald Pfaff
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 173
Release: 2019
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1108433332

A succinct, neurobiological explanation of the pathways that 'wake up the brain' from deep anesthesia, sleep and brain injury.

Biopolitical Screens

Biopolitical Screens
Author: Pasi Valiaho
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262548976

An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art. In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war. Väliaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen platforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptual foundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visual economy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of “neuropower”; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines three instances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime of sensibility rather than reinforce it.

How the Vertebrate Brain Regulates Behavior

How the Vertebrate Brain Regulates Behavior
Author: Donald Pfaff
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2017-05-22
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0674978773

Throughout his remarkable career, Donald Pfaff has demonstrated that by choosing problems and methods with care, biologists can study the molecular mechanisms of brains more complex than those of fruit flies, snails, roundworms, and other invertebrates. His half century in the lab, starting with his discovery of hormone receptors in the brains of mammals and leading to the first detailed account of a neural circuit for mammalian behavior, puts him in a unique position to survey the origins and development of behavioral neurobiology and the current state of research. How the Vertebrate Brain Regulates Behavior offers a close-up, conversational perspective on scientific struggles and successes throughout a fifty-year quest to understand how behavior is regulated in a complex organism. In graduate school, when Pfaff expressed a desire to study behavioral regulation, his advisor suggested focusing on hormones. Pfaff’s investigation into the hormonal basis of female sexual behavior in laboratory rats led him to a comprehensive appreciation of how hormone-dependent neurons work through neural circuits to produce discrete behaviors among all vertebrates. This breakthrough, along with other researchers’ findings, established a link between molecular biology and neuroscience that opened up a fruitful new field of inquiry. Pfaff’s approach is to focus on one solvable problem and explore it from many angles. He begins with a single observed behavior and traces its regulation through a series of biological mechanisms—from hormones to genes to neural circuits. Pfaff’s relentless pursuit of his goals continues to inspire neuroscientists today.

Perception and Machine Intelligence

Perception and Machine Intelligence
Author: Malay K. Kundu
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2012-01-19
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 3642273866

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First Indo-Japanese conference on Perception and Machine Intelligence, PerMIn 2012, held in Kolkata, India, in January 2012. The 41 papers, presented together with 1 keynote paper and 3 plenary papers, were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the book. The papers are organized in topical sections named perception; human-computer interaction; e-nose and e-tongue; machine intelligence and application; image and video processing; and speech and signal processing.

Neuroscience in the 21st Century

Neuroscience in the 21st Century
Author: Donald W. Pfaff
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 4592
Release: 2022-10-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 3030888320

Edited and authored by a wealth of international experts in neuroscience and related disciplines, this key new resource aims to offer medical students and graduate researchers around the world a comprehensive introduction and overview of modern neuroscience. Neuroscience research is certain to prove a vital element in combating mental illness in its various incarnations, a strategic battleground in the future of medicine, as the prevalence of mental disorders is becoming better understood each year. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are affected by mental, behavioral, neurological and substance use disorders. The World Health Organization estimated in 2002 that 154 million people globally suffer from depression and 25 million people from schizophrenia; 91 million people are affected by alcohol use disorders and 15 million by drug use disorders. A more recent WHO report shows that 50 million people suffer from epilepsy and 24 million from Alzheimer’s and other dementias. Because neuroscience takes the etiology of disease—the complex interplay between biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors—as its object of inquiry, it is increasingly valuable in understanding an array of medical conditions. A recent report by the United States’ Surgeon General cites several such diseases: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, early-onset depression, autism, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, anorexia nervosa, and panic disorder, among many others. Not only is this volume a boon to those wishing to understand the future of neuroscience, it also aims to encourage the initiation of neuroscience programs in developing countries, featuring as it does an appendix full of advice on how to develop such programs. With broad coverage of both basic science and clinical issues, comprising around 150 chapters from a diversity of international authors and including complementary video components, Neuroscience in the 21st Century in its third edition serves as a comprehensive resource to students and researchers alike.

Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences, Volume 1

Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences, Volume 1
Author: Gary G. Berntson
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2009-10-12
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0470083565

As technology has made imaging of the brain noninvasive and inexpensive, nearly every psychologist in every subfield is using pictures of the brain to show biological connections to feelings and behavior. Handbook of Neuroscience for the Behavioral Sciences, Volume I provides psychologists and other behavioral scientists with a solid foundation in the increasingly critical field of neuroscience. Current and accessible, this volume provides the information they need to understand the new biological bases, research tools, and implications of brain and gene research as it relates to psychology.

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf
Author: John Coates
Publisher: Random House Canada
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0307359697

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of financial boom and bust, showing how risk-taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria or stressed-out depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have a lot to do with male hormones. In a series of startling experiments, Canadian scientist Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk in men, especially young men; he has vividly dubbed the moment when traders transform into exuberant high flyers "the hour between dog and wolf." Similarly, intense failure leads to a rise in levels of cortisol, which dramatically lowers the appetite for risk. His book expands on his seminal research to offer lessons from the exploding new field studying the biology of risk. Coates's conclusions shed light on all types of high-pressure decision-making, from the sports field to the battlefield, and leaves us with a powerful recognition: to handle risk isn't a matter of mind over body, it's a matter of mind and body working together. We all have it in us to be transformed from dog to wolf; the only question is whether we can understand the causes and the consequences.

Law and Neuroscience

Law and Neuroscience
Author: Michael Freeman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 583
Release: 2011-02-10
Genre: Law
ISBN: 019959984X

Current Legal Issues, like its sister volume Current Legal Problems, is based upon an annual colloquium held at Univesity College London. Each year leading scholars from around the world gather to discuss the relationship between law and another discipline of thought. Each colloquium examines how the external discipline is conceived in legal thought and argument, how the law is pictured in that discipline, and analyses points of controversy in the use, and abuse, of extra-legal arguments within legal theory and practice. Law and Neuroscience, the latest volume in the Current Legal Issues series, offers an insight into the state of law and nueroscience scholarship today. Focussing on the inter-connections between the two disciplines, it addresses the key issues informing current debates.