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The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together - Paperback | Diverse Reads

The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together

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A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ.

Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, cognition, or memory, but The Entangled Brain tackles a much bigger question: What kind of object is the brain? Neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa describes the brain as a highly networked, interconnected system that cannot be neatly decomposed into a set of independent parts. One can’t point to the brain and say, “This is where emotion happens” (or any other mental faculty). Pessoa argues that only by understanding how large-scale neural circuits combine multiple and diverse signals can we truly appreciate how the brain supports the mind.

Presenting the brain as an integrated organ and drawing on neuroscience, computation, mathematics, systems theory, and evolution, The Entangled Brain explains how brain functions result from cross-cutting brain processing, not the function of segregated areas. Parts of the brain work in a coordinated fashion across large-scale distributed networks in which disparate parts of the cortex and the subcortex work simultaneously to bring about behaviors. Pessoa intuitively explains the concepts needed to formalize this idea of the brain as a complex system and how to unleash powerful understandings built with “collective computations.”

ISBN-13: 9780262544603

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: MIT Press

Publication Date: 11-15-2022

Pages: 280

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Luiz Pessoa is Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. He is the author of The Cognitive-Emotional Brain (The MIT Press).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“It’s all about complex, entangled networks. That’s the theme of this superb book about the brain and its role in generating cognition and behavior. For anyone who wants to learn about the brain and its relationship to the mind, this book is essential reading.”
—Evan Thompson, author of Mind in Life and Waking, Dreaming, Being;coauthor of The Embodied Mind
 
“In this ambitious book, Luiz Pessoa deftly argues the case that the brain is not a modular system that can be understood one region at a time, but rather a complex network of interconnected, interdependent parts. Drawing from comparative neuroanatomy, mathematical biology, and complex systems theory, he convincingly demonstrates that brain regions can participate in specific functions only when embedded within larger networks. In this highly readable work that will appeal to everyone from curious youths to seasoned neuroscientists, he takes on the age-old question: How does the brain work? It turns out, the answer is: It’s complicated.”
—Lucina Q. Uddin, Professor, University of California Los Angeles

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 From One Area at a Time to Networked Systems 1

2 Learning a Bit of Anatomy 15

3 The Minimal Brain: Building Simple Defenses and Seeking Rewards 31

4 What Do Brain Areas Do? 47

5 Emotion and Motivation: The Subcortical Players 65

6 Emotion and Motivation: The Cortex Comes to the Party 93

7 Cognition and the Prefrontal Cortex 111

8 Complex Systems: The Science of Interacting Parts 129

9 500 Million Years of Evolution 145

10 The Big Network: Putting Things Together 167

11 Unlearning Fear 193

12 It's All about Complex, Entangled Networks 215

Glossary 231

Notes 235

References 247

Index 261