{"product_id":"the-continuity-of-mind-oxford-psychology-series","title":"The Continuity of Mind (Oxford Psychology Series)","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology  with its computer metaphor of the mind  is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However  the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment  allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory  cognitive and computational neuroscience  connectionism  and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.  In this book  Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence  understanding a visual scene  or just thinking about the days events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time  i.e.  a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result  the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time  the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your thoughts) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions  but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result  your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you  even right now  can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states. Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception  cognition  and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow  rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result  the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out  upon closer inspection  to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events  as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization  language comprehension  visual perception  as well as attention  action  and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44962905817141,"sku":"ByrdShop_0195370783","price":157.02,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780195370782.jpg?v=1770400256","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-continuity-of-mind-oxford-psychology-series","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}