Oracle Bones is a new form of political satire—the state of current American politics reimagined as a sequence of poetic warnings to a foolish and dissolute king who ruled back at the dawn of Chinese civilization. Thousands of years ago, a shaman would query the gods by carving a question on a bone and applying heat until cracks formed. The answer was then recorded on the "oracle bone". Keith Holyoak—poet, psychologist, and translator of classical Chinese poetry—has created oracle bones fo...

What makes human cognition distinct from animal and artificial forms of intelligence—and how analogies play a crucial role in our unique abilities.In The Human Edge, cognitive scientist, poet, and translator Keith Holyoak takes a fresh look at what makes human intelligence special. His focus is analogy—the ability to see relational similarities between things that on the surface seem unalike. The book brings together a half century of research in cognitive...

Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu is a bilingual collection of English and Chinese versions of poetry by Li Bai and Du Fu, the most renowned poets in all of Chinese literature. Translated by Keith Holyoak, this volume includes an introduction to the poets and their work, plus a bibliography. Holyoak's translations capture the essential beauty of the poets’ language, while retaining key elements of the structure of the original poems, including their metric form and rhyme scheme. The poems transpor...

The Psychology of Learning and Motivation publishes empirical and theoretical contributions in cognitive and experimental psychology, ranging from classical and instrumental conditions to complex learning and problem solving. This guest-edited special volume is devoted to current research and discussion on associative versus cognitive accounts of learning. Written by major investigators in the field, topics include all aspects of causal learning in an open forum in which different approach...

An examination of metaphor in poetry as a microcosm of the human imagination—a way to understand the mechanisms of creativity.In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the perspectives of thinkers from the humanities—poets, philosophers, and critics—and from the sciences—psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and computer scientists. He begins each chap...

How is it that thoroughly physical material beings such as ourselves can think, dream, feel, create and understand ideas, theories and concepts? How does mere matter give rise to all these non-material mental states, including consciousness itself? An answer to this central question of our existence is emerging at the busy intersection of neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and robotics. In this groundbreaking work, philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark explores exc...

What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person...

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The result has been the emergence of one of the most exciting and fruitful areas of inter-disciplinary research in the history of science. This volume...

Reading is a highly complex skill that is prerequisite to success in many societies in which a great deal of information is communicated in written form. Since the 1970s, much has been learned about the reading process from research by cognitive psychologists. This book summarizes that important work and puts it into a coherent framework.The book’s central theme is how readers go about extracting information from the printed page and comprehending the text. Like its predecessor, th...

Is the Ego nothing but our brain? Are our mental and psychological states nothing but neuronal states of our brain? Though Sigmund Freud rejected a neuroscientific foundation for psychoanalysis, recent knowledge in neuroscience has provided novel insights into the brain and its neuronal mechanisms. This has also shed light on how the brain itself contributes to the differentiation between neuronal and psychological states. In Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice , Georg Northoff discus...

The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition offers a systematic and accessible overview of the main psychological areas and theories in order to keep abreast of the ongoing paradigm shift.

This book contains essential data necessary to develop both a learning theory and a theory of therapeutic change for psychoanalysis. It approaches how the mind-brain deals with the acquisition, transfer, modification, and utilization of information.