The Continuity of Mind (Oxford Psychology) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Spivey
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $35.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 224731
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0195370783
Dewey Decimal Number: 153
EAN: 9780195370782
ASIN: 0195370783
Publication Date: August 5, 2008
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Product Description
The 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 day's 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.
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Deep, great, diverse book September 25, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
M. Spivey presents some deep material. The book is just filled with evidence for a very core idea: Our understanding of the mind should be based on continuous functions, and not on the choppy file-copy concepts of a computer system (like the kind I'm typing this on). The book taps into areas that span much of what would satisfy very diverse interests: perception, language, problem solving, consciousness, with neuroscience stuff everywhere. And for any geeks, he supplies programming code at the back of this book for you to run some of the theoretical model systems he uses to demonstrate continuous theories. In short, the book is deep and interesting and will entertain and interest anyone interested in understanding the mind.
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