Not consciousness, but knowledge of consciousness: that is what this book communicates in a fascinating way. Consciousness is the thread that links the disappearing gorilla with the octopus suffering from a stomach ache, and the person under anaesthetic with a new born baby. How these are different, yet illustrative of consciousness, is revealed in this accessible book by one of the world's leading thinkers and neural computing engineers.Igor Aleksander addresses this enigmatic topic, by m...

I. ALEKSANDER Kobler Unit for Information Technology Management, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, England It is now over half a decade since Joseph Engelberger wrote: 'Given a six-articulation arm of any configuration, software can be powerful enough to think only in tool coordinates. That is, a programmer concerns himself only with the tool on the end of the robot arm. He can think of the tool's frame of reference and com puter subroutines automatically make the various...

Impossible Minds: My Neurons, My Consciousness has been written to satisfy the curiosity each and every one of us has about our own consciousness. It takes the view that the neurons in our heads are the source of consciousness and attempts to explain how this happens. Although it talks of neural networks, it explains what they are and what they do in such a way that anyone may understand. While the topic is partly philosophical, the text makes no assumptions of prior knowledge of philosoph...

Aristotle's convincing philosophy is likely to have shaped (even indirectly) many of our current beliefs, prejudices and attitudes to life. This includes the way in which our mind (that is, our capacity to have private thoughts) appears to elude a scientific description. This book is about a scientific ingredient that was not available to Aristotle: the science of information. Would the course of the philosophy of the mind have been different had Aristotle pronounced that the matter of min...

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems - BICS 2010 aims to bring together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic and synthetic methods both to understand the astonishing processing properties of biological systems and specifically of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance engineering methods to build artificial systems with higher levels of cognitive competence.BICS is a meeting point of brain scientists and cognitive systems engineers where cross-domain ideas are...

Brain Inspired Cognitive Systems 2008 (June 24-27, 2008; São Luís, Brazil) brought together leading scientists and engineers who use analytic, syntactic and computational methods both to understand the prodigious processing properties of biological systems and, specifically, of the brain, and to exploit such knowledge to advance computational methods towards ever higher levels of cognitive competence.This book includes the papers presented at four major symposia:Part I - Co...

Issues concerning the unity of minds, bodies and the world have often recurred in the history of philosophy and, more recently, in scientific models. Taking into account both the philosophical and scientific knowledge about consciousness, this book presents and discusses some theoretical guiding ideas for the science of consciousness. The authors argue that, within this interdisciplinary context, a consensus appears to be emerging assuming that the conscious mind and the functioning brain ...

This text is intended for a broad audience as both an introduction to predictive models as well as a guide to applying them. Non-mathematical readers will appreciate the intuitive explanations of the techniques while an emphasis on problem-solving with real data across a wide variety of applications will aid practitioners who wish to extend their expertise. Readers should have knowledge of basic statistical ideas, such as correlation and linear regression analysis. While the text is biased...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become the most popular method for imaging brain function. Handbook of Functional MRI Data Analysis provides a comprehensive and practical introduction to the methods used for fMRI data analysis. Using minimal jargon, this book explains the concepts behind processing fMRI data, focusing on the techniques that are most commonly used in the field. This book provides background about the methods employed by common data analysis packages includi...

Many of the commonly used methods for modeling and fitting psychophysical data are special cases of statistical procedures of great power and generality, notably the Generalized Linear Model (GLM). This book illustrates how to fit data from a variety of psychophysical paradigms using modern statistical methods and the statistical language R. The paradigms include signal detection theory, psychometric function fitting, classification images and more. In two chapters, recently developed meth...

Computational Intelligence: Synergies of Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computing presents an introduction to some of the cutting edge technological paradigms under the umbrella of computational intelligence. Computational intelligence schemes are investigated with the development of a suitable framework for fuzzy logic, neural networks and evolutionary computing, neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary-fuzzy systems and evolutionary neural systems. Applications to linear...

This is a uniquely comprehensive reference that summarizes the state of the art of signal processing theory and techniques for solving emerging problems in neuroscience, and which clearly presents new theory, algorithms, software and hardware tools that are specifically tailored to the nature of the neurobiological environment. It gives a broad overview of the basic principles, theories and methods in statistical signal processing for basic and applied neuroscience problems.Written...