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H. G. Wells, a prolific science fiction writer, also wrote many non-fiction works that may be found interesting and/or pertinent for our current times.Could world events be following a script?Volume 2 of this Trio contains: World Brain - Essays and addresses written during 1936-38. Wells vision of a new, free, synthetic, authoritative, permanent World Encyclopaedia that could help world citizens make the best use of universal information resources and make the best contribution to world peace.Socialism and the Family -Two papers written in 1906, detailing the attitude of Modem Socialism to family life.Washington, the Riddle/Hope of Peace -These Twenty-Nine essays were published throughout 1922 as Wells observations during his visit to Washington, DC.In spite of an awareness of possible world catastrophe that underlay much of his earlier writings and flared up again in old age, H. G. Wells was regarded as the chief literary spokesman of the liberal optimism that preceded World War I. No other writer has caught so vividly the energy of this period, its adventurousness, its feeling of release from the conventions of Victorian thought and propriety. Wells's influence was enormous, both on his own generation and on that which immediately followed it. None of his contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete freedom. Though in many ways hasty, ill-tempered, and contradictory, Wells was undeviating and fearless in his efforts for social equality, world peace, and what he considered to be the future good of humanity.
Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception, How do we acquire the brain's mechanisms for vision? This is the nature-nurture question as to whether the nerve connections responsible for vision are innate or whether they develop through experience in the early life of an animal or human. This is a book about the collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel, which began in 1958, lasted until about 1982, and led to a Nobel Prize in 1981. It opens with short autobiographies of both men, describes the state of the field when they started, and tells about the beginnings of their collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of various mentors in their lives, especially Stephen W. Kuffler, who opened up the field by studying the cat retina in 1950, and founded the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where most of their work was done. The main part of the book consists of Hubel and Wiesel's most important publications. Each reprinted paper is preceded by a foreword that tells how they went about the research, what the difficulties and the pleasures were, and whether they felt a paper was important and why. Each is also followed by an afterword describing how the paper was received and what developments have occurred since its publication. The reader learns things that are often absent from typical scientific publications, including whether the work was difficult, fun, personally rewarding, exhilarating, or just plain tedious. The book ends with a summing-up of the authors' view of the present state of the field. This is much more than a collection of reprinted papers. Above all it tells the story of an unusual scientific collaboration that was hugely enjoyable and served to transform an entire branch of neurobiology. It will appeal to neuroscientists, vision scientists, biologists, psychologists, physicists, historians of science, and to their students and trainees, at all levels from high school on, as well as anyone else who is interested in the scientific process.
An argument that the complexities of brain function can be understood hierarchically, in terms of different levels of abstraction, as silicon computing is.The vast differences between the brain's neural circuitry and a computer's silicon circuitry might suggest that they have nothing in common. In fact, as Dana Ballard argues in this book, computational tools are essential for understanding brain function. Ballard shows that the hierarchical organization of the brain has many parallels with the hierarchical organization of computing; as in silicon computing, the complexities of brain computation can be dramatically simplified when its computation is factored into different levels of abstraction.Drawing on several decades of progress in computational neuroscience, together with recent results in Bayesian and reinforcement learning methodologies, Ballard factors the brain's principal computational issues in terms of their natural place in an overall hierarchy. Each of these factors leads to a fresh perspective. A neural level focuses on the basic forebrain functions and shows how processing demands dictate the extensive use of timing-based circuitry and an overall organization of tabular memories. An embodiment level organization works in reverse, making extensive use of multiplexing and on-demand processing to achieve fast parallel computation. An awareness level focuses on the brain's representations of emotion, attention and consciousness, showing that they can operate with great economy in the context of the neural and embodiment substrates.
The field of brain stimulation is advancing at rapid pace with a growing number of techniques now approved for the treatment of psychiatric illness. This text acts both as a concise, quick reference for experienced practitioners and a guidebook for residents learning about clinical brain stimulation techniques. The techniques covered include: • Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) • Deep brain stimulation (DBS) • Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) • Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) • Magnetic seizure therapy (MST) • Transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) All aspects of these treatments are covered, from patient selection, through the implementation of the technique, to patient aftercare. Potential future applications are discussed and select, up-to-date reference lists guide practitioners to the most important further reading around each technique. Portable, concise and easy to navigate, covering all the need-to-know information, Brain Stimulation in Psychiatry is essential reading for practitioners, residents and medical students in psychiatry and neurology.
Presented as a series of lectures, this important volume achieves four major goals: 1) It integrates the results of the author's research as applied to pattern perception -- reviewing current brain research and showing how several lines of inquiry have been converging to produce a paradigm shift in our understanding of the neural basis of figural perception. 2) It updates the holographic hypothesis of brain function in perception. 3) It emphasizes the fact that both distributed (holistic) and localized (structural) processes characterize brain function. 4) It portrays a neural systems analysis of brain organization in figural perception by computational models -- describing processing in terms of formalisms found useful in ordering data in 20th-century physical and engineering sciences. The lectures are divided into three parts: a Prolegomenon outlining a theoretical framework for the presentation; Part I dealing with the configural aspects of perception; and Part II presenting its cognitive aspects. The appendices were developed in a collaborative effort by the author, Kunio Yasue, and Mari Jibu (both of Notre Dame Seishin University of Okayama, Japan).
