All too often, gifted and advanced learners are just accelerated, without fueling the creative thinking and problem solving that they are capable of. This book bursts with thrilling, mind-stretching enrichment activities designed to stimulate higher level thinking for gifted students in grades 5-12. Challenge the learners in your classroom to explore and evaluate assumptions they make about their world; conduct surveys about current, hot issues and analyze the results; or solve complex logic mysteries in small learning groups. These activities and lessons vary in length from one class period to several weeks, and have enough activities to be used all year. Skills are developed by using: creative research ideas, creative thinking tasks, daring debates, blueprints for business, and philosophical problems. For example, in one activity, students are asked to review various classification systems from areas as diverse as biology and history. Then, they discuss and identify the various steps needed to create a classification system. Next, students consider and discuss various examples about humor, then create, test, and evaluate their own classification system for humor. Finally, students produce their own examples of humor and classify them according to the system they have created. One of the features that makes this book outstanding is that each activity has been field-tested for at least five years in secondary classrooms. The book and each lesson in it provide in-depth information and advice for the classroom teacher. Grades 5-12

The debate between internalism and externalism has become a focal point of attention both in epistemology and in the philosophy of mind and language. Externalism challenges basic traditional internalist conceptions of the nature of knowledge, justification, thought and language. What is at stake, is the very form that theories in epistemology and the philosophy of mind ought to take. This volume is a collection of original contributions of leading international authors reflecting on the present state of the art concerning the exciting controversies between internalism and externalism.

Conrad's Models of Mind was first published in 1971. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In a new approach to understanding the psychological assumptions that lie behind the creation of a work of fiction, Professor Johnson analyzes a number of Joseph Conrad's novels and short stories, identifying and explaining Conrad's changing conceptions or models of mind. As he points out in his introduction: "Every writer makes assumptions about the nature of the mind, whether they may be elaborate theories, metaphors that seem simple but imply a great deal, downright beliefs, or vague gestalten. And such assumptions color his whole creation, the way his characters think and feel and react, possibly even his choice of subject matter." The author traces Conrad's steady progression away from deductive psychology, involving such entities as will, passion, ego, or sympathy, toward a flexible, and, for the period, new psychology that had implications for his entire development as a writer. Professor Johnson finds certain affinities between Conrad's models of mind and those of a number of other writers, among them, Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Pascal. He shows that one aspect of Conrad's psychology was closely allied to the Schopenhauerian concept of will but that when he wrote Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo Conrad moved toward an existential concept of self-image and self-creation similar to Sartre's psychology in Being and Nothingness. Finally, Professor Johnson examines Conrad's novel The Rescue and shows how hopeless it was for Conrad to return to earlier conceptions of mind after he had explored the new existential models.

Making sense of such bewildering problems as hallucinations, paranoia, depression, and anxiety seems an incredible challenge, but modern psychiatry is able to bring understanding and change to many of those whose lives are impaired by psychiatric problems. This is not accomplished through the application of one dominant psychological theory, but through the integration of perspectives of many such theories in this diverse field into a befitting approach-the biopsychosocial model. Application of the biopsychosocial model will allow for understanding the patient in biological, psychological, and social terms simultaneously, and provide a holistic picture with multiple strategies for treatment. In this book, the author takes a step back from the assessment to demonstrate to the student methods of the information gathered from the patient into a clinically useful whole, essentially showing exactly how and why the psychiatrist arrives at an intervention.

Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

Model building is typically based on the identification of a set of established facts in any given field of research, insofar as the model is then evaluated on how well it accounts for these facts. Psychology – and specifically visual word identification and reading – is no exception in this sense (e.g., Amenta & Crepaldi, 2012; Coltheart et al., 2001; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). What counts as an established fact, however, was never discussed in great detail. It was typically considered, for example, that experimental effects need to replicate across, e.g., individuals, experimental settings, and languages if they are to be believed. The emphasis was on consistency, perhaps under a tacit assumption that the universal principles lying behind our cognitive structures determine our behaviour for the most part (or at least for that part that is relevant for model building). There are signs that a different approach is growing up in reading research. On a theoretical ground, Dennis Norris’ Bayesian reader (2006, 2009) has advanced the idea that models can dispense of static forms of representation (i.e., fixed architectures), and process information in a way that is dynamically constrained by context-specific requirements. Ram Frost (2012) has focused on language-specific constraints in the development of general theories of reading. On an empirical ground, the most notable recent advance in visual word identification concern the demonstration that some previously established (in the classic sense) effects depend heavily on language (Velan and Frost, 2011), task (e.g., Duñabeitia et al., 2011; Marelli et al., 2013; Kinoshita and Norris, 2009), or even individual differences (Andrews & Lo, 2012, 2013). Variability has become an intrinsic and informative aspect of cognitive processing, rather than a sign of experimental weakness. This Research Topic aims at moving forward in this new direction by providing an outlet for experimental and theoretical papers that: (i) explore more in depth the theoretical basis for considering variability as an intrinsic property of the human cognitive system; (ii) highlight new context-dependent experimental effects, in a way that is informative on the dynamics of the underlying cognitive processing; (iii) shed new light on known context-dependent experimental effects, again in a way that enhances their theoretical informativeness.