Why you are more than just a brain, more than just a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Who are you? Are you just a brain? A brain and a body? All the things you have done and the friends you have made? Many of us assume that who we really are is something deep inside us, an inner sanctuary that contains our true selves. In Who You Are, Michael Spivey argues that the opposite is true: that you are more than a brain, more than a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Rather than peeling layers away to reveal the inner you, Spivey traces who you are outward. You may already feel in your heart that something outside your body is actually part of you—a child, a place, a favorite book. Spivey confirms this intuition with scientific findings. With each chapter, Spivey incrementally expands a common definition of the self. After (gently) helping you to discard your assumptions about who you are, he draws on research in cognitive science and neuroscience to explain the back-and-forth among all the regions of the brain and the interaction between the brain and body. He then makes the case for understanding objects and locations in your environment as additional parts of who we are. Going even further, he shows that, just as interaction links brain, body, and environment, ever-expanding systems of interaction link humans to other humans, to nonhuman animals, and to nonliving matter. This may seem an interaction or two too far. But you don't have to take his word for it—just consider the evidence he presents.
The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, but dynamical-systems accounts of mental activity are now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing them to more beyond merely brandishing trendy buzzwords. The Continuity of the 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 The Continuity of the Mind Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the days events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a 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 is comprised of diverse mental states. Spivey has arranged The Continuity of the 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. The initial chapters provide empirical 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 conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space.
The Art of Proving Binomial Identities accomplishes two goals: (1) It provides a unified treatment of the binomial coefficients, and (2) Brings together much of the undergraduate mathematics curriculum via one theme (the binomial coefficients). The binomial coefficients arise in a variety of areas of mathematics: combinatorics, of course, but also basic algebra (binomial theorem), infinite series (Newton’s binomial series), differentiation (Leibniz’s generalized product rule), special functions (the beta and gamma functions), probability, statistics, number theory, finite difference calculus, algorithm analysis, and even statistical mechanics. The book is very suitable for advanced undergraduates or beginning graduate students and includes various exercises asking them to prove identities. Students will find that the text and notes at the end of the chapters encourages them to look at binomial coefficients from different angles. With this learning experience, students will be able to understand binomial coefficients in a new way. Features: Provides a unified treatment of many of the techniques for proving binomial coefficient identities. Ties together several of the courses in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum via a single theme. A textbook for a capstone or senior seminar course in mathematics. Contains several results by the author on proof techniques for binomial coefficients that are not well-known. Ideal for self-study, it contains a large number of exercises at the end of each chapter, with hints or solutions for every exercise at the end of the book.
Have you ever been involved in a project that didn’t require a meeting? Neither have we. Well-run project meetings allow teams to get through the maze of distractions and obstacles to achieve results. Unfortunately, many project meetings aren’t well-run—they are viewed, by team members, as unproductive, tedious, wastes of precious time. But you can change that. The Project Meeting Facilitator contains practical techniques and practices that will help you facilitate our meetings more effectively, transforming them into well-planned, well-managed journeys that engage the team while achieving the intended goals.
Why you are more than just a brain, more than just a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Who are you? Are you just a brain? A brain and a body? All the things you have done and the friends you have made? Many of us assume that who we really are is something deep inside us, an inner sanctuary that contains our true selves. In Who You Are, Michael Spivey argues that the opposite is true: that you are more than a brain, more than a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are. Rather than peeling layers away to reveal the inner you, Spivey traces who you are outward. You may already feel in your heart that something outside your body is actually part of you—a child, a place, a favorite book. Spivey confirms this intuition with scientific findings. With each chapter, Spivey incrementally expands a common definition of the self. After (gently) helping you to discard your assumptions about who you are, he draws on research in cognitive science and neuroscience to explain the back-and-forth among all the regions of the brain and the interaction between the brain and body. He then makes the case for understanding objects and locations in your environment as additional parts of who we are. Going even further, he shows that, just as interaction links brain, body, and environment, ever-expanding systems of interaction link humans to other humans, to nonhuman animals, and to nonliving matter. This may seem an interaction or two too far. But you don't have to take his word for it—just consider the evidence he presents.
This imaginative approach to the era in which Western civilization was born is a thorough--and thoroughly accessible--synthesis of the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan worlds, spanning the period from Late Geometric Greece in around 700 b.c., to the rule of Constantine in the early 4th century a.d. The authors incorporate important developments in recent scholarship, including ideas of gender, war and pacifism, imperialism and dissent, political propaganda, economy, cultural identity, racism, hygiene and diet, and public and private uses of space. The book highlights the modern relevance of classical antiquity, from its influence on contemporary politics to the representation of the female body in Western art, and concludes by charting the history of classical civilization. The extensive reference section includes biographies, an introduction to classical mythology, a glossary of technical terms and vase shapes, as well as a timeline, map, bibliography, and index.
We are here with you today." With those few words in August 1973, Sarah Chambers, her husband Richard, and their good friends Alice and Dick started a journey that took them far beyond anything they could possibly imagine. They explored the unseen realm of the spiritual world with their teacher "Michael." Along with good friend Eugene Trout, they created a new spiritual teaching - based in love - that helps people become more of who they truly are. The group kept transcripts of their meetings and those transcripts were copied and passed around to their friends and coworkers, then copied and passed to many others over the years. Volume 1 contains those transcripts - digitized, formatted for easier reading and edited to remove most real names. . . . "Why am I here?" someone asked one night. Michael answered, "To hear the words you didn't hear 2,000 years ago. Maybe this time, you will listen.
#1 New York Times Bestseller — With a new Afterword "Guaranteed to make blood boil." —Janet Maslin, New York Times In Michael Lewis's game-changing bestseller, a small group of Wall Street iconoclasts realize that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders. They band together—some of them walking away from seven-figure salaries—to investigate, expose, and reform the insidious new ways that Wall Street generates profits. If you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you.
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