Groping around a familiar room in the dark, relearning to read after a brain injury, navigating a virtual landscape through an avatar: all are expressions of vicariance—when the brain substitutes one process or function for another. Alain Berthoz shows that this capacity allows humans to think creatively in an increasingly complex world.
This interpretation of perception and action allows Alain Berthoz to focus on psychological phenomena: proprioception and kinaesthesis; the mechanisms that maintain balance and co-ordination actions; and basic perceptual and memory processes involved in navigation.
“Simplexity, as I understand it, is the range of solutions living organisms have found, despite the complexity of natural processes, to enable the brain to prepare an action and plan for the consequences of it. These solutions are simplifying principles that enable the processing of information or situations, by taking into account past experience and anticipating the future. They are neither caricatures, shortcuts, or summaries. They are new ways of asking questions, sometimes at the cost of occasional detours, in order to achieve faster, more elegant, more effective actions.” A. B. As Alain Berthoz demonstrates in this profoundly original book, simplicity is never easy; it requires suppressing, selecting, connecting, thinking, in order to then act in the best way possible. And what if we, in turn, are inspired by the living world to process the complexity that surrounds us? Alain Berthoz is professor at the Collège de France where he is co-director of the Laboratoire de physiologie de la perception et de l’action. [Laboratory for the physiology of perception and action]. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and is the author of Le Sens du mouvement [The Brain's Sense of Movement] and La Décision [Emotion and Reason].
History shows us the same grim phenomenon over and over: under extreme circumstances, apparently ordinary citizens turn into merciless torturers and systematic executioners of defenseless victims. War crimes and genocides may be orchestrated by dictators and terrorist leaders,but they are carried out by individuals who otherwise show empathy, sound moral judgment, and aversion to violence. How does this happen? Is the pull of a murderous regime strong enough to make harmless men become amoral monsters, or is there some underlying psychological or physiological trait that predisposes certain people toward this transition? Can the pathological switch between sensitive human and desensitized killer be isolated, redicted, and prevented? Can it be overridden by compassion and altruism? Is violent aggression addictive? What implications does this have for the way we try and punish perpetrators of such crimes? These are among the questions taken up in a series of conferences on mass violence held from 2015 to 2017 at the Paris Institute of Advanced Studies. In this volume, neuroscientists, sociologists, historians, and legal scholars share research and insights on the roots of radicalization, in-group loyalty, how we learn to follow rules, and many other themes. The result is a troubling but distinctly illuminating glimpse of human nature, and a model of how interdisciplinary dialogue can shed light into its darkest corners. With contributions from Xabier Agirre Aranburu; Scott Atran; Alain Berthoz and Bérangère Thirioux; Thomas Boraud; Michel Botbol; Emile Bruneau;Christopher R. Browning; David Cohen and Nicolas Campelo;Jean-Paul Costa; Susan T. Fiske; Itzhak Fried; Julie Grèzes and Jorge L. Armony; Patrick Haggard; Etienne Koechlin; Heather D. Lucas, Daniel Sanchez, Jessica D. Creery, Xiaoqing Hu, and Ken A. Paller; Gretty M. Mirdal;Mathias Pessiglione; Richard Rechtman; Trevor W. Robbins; Edmund T. Rolls; Françoise Sironi; James K. Stewart; and Jean-Pol Tassin.
At the beginning of the 20th century, German biologist Jakob von Uexküll created the concept of "Umwelt" to denote the environment as experienced by a subject. This concept of environment differs from the idea of passive surroundings and is defined not just by physical surroundings, but is rather a "subjective universe", a space weighted with meaning. Today, neuroscience provides a new way to look at the brain’s capability to create a representation of the world. At the same time behavioural specialists are demonstrating that animals have a richer mental universe than previously known. Philosophical reflection thus finds itself with more experimental and objective data as well. Nearly a century after the publication of von Uexküll’s founding work ("Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere" was published in 1909), neurobiologists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, ethologists, and philosophers revisit his mail concept at the light of modern science
The neuroscientist Alain Berthoz experimented on Russian astronauts in space to answer these questions: How does weightlessness affect motion? How are motion and three-dimensional space perceived? In this erudite and witty book, Berthoz describes how human beings on earth perceive and control bodily movement. Reviewing a wealth of research in neurophysiology and experimental psychology, he argues for a rethinking of the traditional separation between action and perception, and for the division of perception into five senses. In Berthoz’s view, perception and cognition are inherently predictive, functioning to allow us to anticipate the consequences of current or potential actions. The brain acts like a simulator that is constantly inventing models to project onto the changing world, models that are corrected by steady, minute feedback from the world. We move in the direction we are looking, anticipate the trajectory of a falling ball, recover when we stumble, and continually update our own physical position, all thanks to this sense of movement. This interpretation of perception and action allows Berthoz, in The Brain’s Sense of Movement, to focus on psychological phenomena largely ignored in standard texts: proprioception and kinaesthesis, the mechanisms that maintain balance and coordinate actions, and basic perceptual and memory processes involved in navigation.
Groping around a familiar room in the dark, relearning to read after a brain injury, navigating a virtual landscape through an avatar: all are expressions of vicariance—when the brain substitutes one process or function for another. Alain Berthoz shows that this capacity allows humans to think creatively in an increasingly complex world.
Will Homo Sapiens be able to tame Artificial Intelligence and open the way towards a new human fulfillment? We are not living in an era that, like so many others, is merely chaotic, but in an epoch that could be a real turning point in the destiny of the human species. Homo Sapiens is not a finished product, but a work in progress, a living organism in evolution, one that has to adapt to new environments. Faced with serial challenges, social, economic, ecological and techno-scientific imbalances, our societies are losing their confidence in the future. And yet from long-time observations in the field, we can observe the discreet development of signs of a radical metamorphosis and new human fulfillment. Perhaps for the first time in its history, Homo Sapiens puts into dialogue its rational, emotional-relational, sensory and spiritual intelligences - and that changes everything.
During sleep, the mammalian brain generates an orderly progression of low frequency oscillations as the brain moves from sleep onset into deep sleep. This book explores the underlying neural mechanisms involved in generating these oscillations through interacting neural assemblies in the thalamus and the cortex. Sleep spindles are involved in the consolidation of experiences in long-term memory during sleep. Written by two leading experts in the field, this book integrates the properties of ion channels, synaptic interactions, and intrinsic cellular mechanisms into biophysical models of neural oscillations in local circuits and distributed networks. In particular, the book focuses on sleep spindles and how they are highjacked by epileptic seizures Reissued in paperback after being unavailable for many years, this revised edition of Thalamocortical Assemblies includes updates to each chapter, highlighting developments since its first publication. The book will be valuable to neuroscientists, neurobiologists, physiologists and computational researchers interested in sleep and memory processes.
The rapid progress of science is shedding new light on the eternal questions of philosophy. Alain Stahl provides an exhaustive and coherent examination of the big questions that physics and the life sciences raise today. This book is a translation of the second French edition (2010), updated and expanded to include the most recent scientific findings. It will be of interest to anyone studying, working in, or thinking about science and philosophy. The author, Dr. Alain Stahl, a scientist by training, spent his outstanding professional career working as a chief technical officer and then managing director of several large French chemical companies. After retiring, he has focused his efforts on integrating insights from scientific and philosophical advances, and the present volume is the culmination of this synthesis.
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