How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence(Bradford Books)

Rolf Pfeifer, Josh C. Bongard
The MIT Press| ISBN 0262162393|
PDF| 394 Pages | 4 MB|


How could the body influence our thinking when it seems obvious that the brain controls the body? In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard demonstrate that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. They argue that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment--in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies. This crucial notion of embodiment underlies fundamental changes in the field of artificial intelligence over the past two decades, and Pfeifer and Bongard use the basic methodology of artificial intelligence--"understanding by building"--to describe their insights. If we understand how to design and build intelligent systems, they reason, we will better understand intelligence in general. In accessible, nontechnical language, and using many examples, they introduce the basic concepts by building on recent developments in robotics, biology, neuroscience, and psychology to outline a possible theory of intelligence. They illustrate applications of such a theory in ubiquitous computing, business and management, and the psychology of human memory. Embodied intelligence, as described by Pfeifer and Bongard, has important implications for our understanding of both natural and artificial intelligence.

From Molecule to Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language

Jerome A. Feldman,
The MIT Press | ISBN 0262062534| 2006|
PDF| 379 Pages| 1 MB|


In From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome Feldman proposes a theory of language and thought that treats language not as an abstract symbol system but as a human biological ability that can be studied as a function of the brain, as vision and motor control are studied. This theory, he writes, is a "bridging theory" that works from extensive knowledge at two ends of a causal chain to explicate the links between. Although the cognitive sciences are revealing much about how our brains produce language and thought, we do not yet know exactly how words are understood or have any methodology for finding out.
Feldman develops his theory in computer simulations--formal models that suggest ways that language and thought may be realized in the brain. Combining key findings and theories from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology, Feldman synthesizes a theory by exhibiting programs that demonstrate the required behavior while remaining consistent with the findings from all disciplines.

>Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science

Henri Cohen,
Elsevier Ltd. | ISBN 0080446124 | 2005 | PDF | 1136 Pages| 5.8 MB |

Categorization, the basic cognitive process of arranging objects into categories, is a fundamental process in human and machine intelligence and is central to investigations and research in cognitive science. Until now, categorization has been approached from singular disciplinary perspectives with little overlap or communication between the disciplines involved (Linguistics, Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Cognitive Anthropology). Henri Cohen and Claire Lefebvre have gathered together a stellar collection of contributors in this unique, ambitious attempt to bring together converging disciplinary and conceptual perspectives on this topic.
"Categorization is a key concept across the range of cognitive sciences, including linguistics and philosophy, yet hitherto it has been hard to find accounts that go beyond the concerns of one or two individual disciplines. The Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science provides just the sort of interdisciplinary approach that is necessary to synthesize knowledge from the different fields and provide the basis for future innovation." Professor Bernard Comrie, Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany "Anyone concerned with language, semantics, or categorization will want to have this encyclopedic collection." Professor Eleanor Rosch, Dept of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts

Robert W. Weisberg,
Wiley| ISBN 0471739995| 2006|
PDF| 640 Pages|6 MB |

How cognitive psychology explains human creativity

Conventional wisdom holds that creativity is a mysterious quality present in a select few individuals. The rest of us, the common view goes, can only stand in awe of great creative achievements: we could never paint Guernica or devise the structure of the DNA molecule because we lack access to the rarified thoughts and inspirations that bless geniuses like Picasso or Watson and Crick. Presented with this view, today's cognitive psychologists largely differ finding instead that \"ordinary\" people employ the same creative thought processes as the greats. Though used and developed differently by different people, creativity can and should be studied as a positive psychological feature shared by all humans.
Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts presents the major psychological theories of creativity and illustrates important concepts with vibrant and detailed case studies that exemplify how to study creative acts with scientific rigor.

Mating Intelligence: Sex, Relationships, and the Mind's Reproductive System

Geher/ Miller,
Lawrence Erlbaum| ISBN 0805857494| 2007| PDF |480 Pages| 2 MB|

Human intelligence is sexually attractive, and strongly predicts the success of sexual relationships, but the behavioral sciences have usually ignored the interface between intelligence and mating. This is the first serious scholarly effort to explore that interface, by examining both universals and individual differences in human mating intelligence. Contributors include some of the most prominent evolutionary psychologists and promising new researchers in human intelligence, social psychology, intimate relationships, and sexuality.
David Buss’ Foreword and the opening chapter explore what ‘mating intelligence’ means, and why it is central to human cognition and sexuality. The book’s six sections then examine (1) our mating mechanisms—universal emotional and cognitive adaptations for mating intelligently—that guide mate search, mate choice, and courtship; (2) how mating intelligence strategically guides our choice of mating tactics and partners given different relationship goals, personality traits, forms of deception, and the existence of children; (3) the genetic and psychiatric causes of individual differences in mating intelligence; (4) how we use mental fitness indicators—forms of human intelligence such as creativity, humor, and emotional intelligence—to attract and retain sexual partners; (5) the ecological and social contexts of mating intelligence; (6) integrative models of mating intelligence that can guide future research.
Mating Intelligence is intended for researchers, advanced students, and courses in human sexuality, intimate relationships, intelligence research, behavior genetics, and evolutionary, personality, social, and clinical psychology.

>> Imagination and the Meaningful Brain (Philosophical Psychopathology)

Arnold H. Modell,
The MIT Press| ISBN 026213425X| 2003| PDF| 272 Pages | 1 MB|

The ultimate goal of the cognitive sciences is to understand how the brain works--how it turns "matter into imagination." In Imagination and the Meaningful Brain, psychoanalyst Arnold Modell claims that subjective human experience must be included in any scientific explanation of how the mind/brain works. Contrary to current attempts to describe mental functioning as a form of computation, his view is that the construction of meaning is not the same as information processing. The intrapsychic complexities of human psychology, as observed through introspection and empathic knowledge of other minds, must be added to the third-person perspective of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Assuming that other mammals are conscious and conscious of their feelings, Modell emphasizes evolutionary continuities and discontinuities of emotion. The limbic system, the emotional brain, is of ancient origin, but only humans have the capacity for generative imagination. By means of metaphor, we are able to interpret, displace, and transform our feelings. To bolster his argument, Modell draws on a variety of disciplines--including psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Only by integrating the objectivity of neuroscience, the phenomenology of introspection, and the intersubjective knowledge of psychoanalysis, he claims, will we be able fully to understand how the mind works.

How the Mind Works

Steven Pinker,
Penguin Books| ISBN 0140244913| 1999|
PDF| 672 Pages| 34.6 MB|

In this extraordinary bestseller, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading cognitive scientists, does for the rest of the mind what he did for language in his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. He 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. And he does it with the wit that prompted Mark Ridley to write in the New York Times Book Review, \"No other science writer makes me laugh so much. . . . [Pinker] deserves the superlatives that are lavished on him.\" The arguments in the book are as bold as its title. Pinker rehabilitates some unfashionable ideas, such as that the mind is a computer and that human nature was shaped by natural selection, and challenges fashionable ones, such as that passionate emotions are irrational, that parents socialize their children, and that nature is good and modern society corrupting.