This book achieves a goal that was set 25 years ago when the HAM theory of human memory was published. This theory reflected one of a number of then-current efforts to create a theory of human cognition that met the twin goals of precision and complexity. Up until then the standard for precision had been the mathematical theories of the 1950s and 1960s. These theories took the form of precise models of specific experiments along with some informal, verbally-stated understanding of how they could be extended to new experiments. They seemed to fall far short of capturing the breadth and power of human cognition that was being demonstrated by the new experimental work in human cognition. The next 10 years saw two major efforts to address the problems of scope. In 1976, the ACT theory was first described and included a production rule system of procedural memory to complement HAM's declarative memory. This provided a computationally adequate system which was indeed capable of accounting for all sorts of cognition. In 1993, a new version of ACT--ACT-R--was published. This was an effort to summarize the theoretical progress made on skill acquisition in the intervening 10 years and to tune the subsymbolic level of ACT-R with the insights of the rational analysis of cognition. Although the appearance of generally-available, full-function code set off a series of events which was hardly planned, it resulted in this book. The catalyst for this was the emergence of a user community. Lebiere insisted that assembling a critical mass of users was essential to the ultimate success of the theory and that a physical gathering was the only way to achieve that goal. This resulted in the First Annual ACT-R Summer School and Workshop, held in 1994. In writing the book, the authors became seized by an aspiration that went beyond just describing the theory correctly. They decided to try to display what the theory could do by collecting together and describing some of its in-house applications. This book reflects decades of work in ACT-R accumulated by many researchers. The chapters are authored by the people that did that particular work. No doubt the reader will be impressed by the scope of the research and the quality of the individual work. Less apparent, but no less important, was the effort that everyone put into achieving the overall consistency and technical integrity of the book. This is the first work in cognitive science to precisely model such a wide range of phenomena with a single theory.

This book achieves a goal that was set 25 years ago when the HAM theory of human memory was published. This theory reflected one of a number of then-current efforts to create a theory of human cognition that met the twin goals of precision and complexity. Up until then the standard for precision had been the mathematical theories of the 1950s and 1960s. These theories took the form of precise models of specific experiments along with some informal, verbally-stated understanding of how they could be extended to new experiments. They seemed to fall far short of capturing the breadth and power of human cognition that was being demonstrated by the new experimental work in human cognition. The next 10 years saw two major efforts to address the problems of scope. In 1976, the ACT theory was first described and included a production rule system of procedural memory to complement HAM's declarative memory. This provided a computationally adequate system which was indeed capable of accounting for all sorts of cognition. In 1993, a new version of ACT--ACT-R--was published. This was an effort to summarize the theoretical progress made on skill acquisition in the intervening 10 years and to tune the subsymbolic level of ACT-R with the insights of the rational analysis of cognition. Although the appearance of generally-available, full-function code set off a series of events which was hardly planned, it resulted in this book. The catalyst for this was the emergence of a user community. Lebiere insisted that assembling a critical mass of users was essential to the ultimate success of the theory and that a physical gathering was the only way to achieve that goal. This resulted in the First Annual ACT-R Summer School and Workshop, held in 1994. In writing the book, the authors became seized by an aspiration that went beyond just describing the theory correctly. They decided to try to display what the theory could do by collecting together and describing some of its in-house applications. This book reflects decades of work in ACT-R accumulated by many researchers. The chapters are authored by the people that did that particular work. No doubt the reader will be impressed by the scope of the research and the quality of the individual work. Less apparent, but no less important, was the effort that everyone put into achieving the overall consistency and technical integrity of the book. This is the first work in cognitive science to precisely model such a wide range of phenomena with a single theory.

"In this lively Very Short Introduction, Tim Bayne explores the nature of thought. Drawing on research from philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology, he examines what we know--and what we don't know--about one of the defining features of human nature: our capacity for thought."--P. [2] of cover.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

A look at the extraordinary ways the brain turns thoughts into actions—and how this shapes our everyday lives Why is it hard to text and drive at the same time? How do you resist eating that extra piece of cake? Why does staring at a tax form feel mentally exhausting? Why can your child expertly fix the computer and yet still forget to put on a coat? From making a cup of coffee to buying a house to changing the world around them, humans are uniquely able to execute necessary actions. How do we do it? Or in other words, how do our brains get things done? In On Task, cognitive neuroscientist David Badre presents the first authoritative introduction to the neuroscience of cognitive control—the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals. We barely notice this routine part of our lives. Yet, cognitive control, also known as executive function, is an astonishing phenomenon that has a profound impact on our well-being. Drawing on cutting-edge research, vivid clinical case studies, and examples from daily life, Badre sheds light on the evolution and inner workings of cognitive control. He examines issues from multitasking and willpower to habitual errors and bad decision making, as well as what happens as our brains develop in childhood and change as we age—and what happens when cognitive control breaks down. Ultimately, Badre shows that cognitive control affects just about everything we do. A revelatory look at how billions of neurons collectively translate abstract ideas into concrete plans, On Task offers an eye-opening investigation into the brain’s critical role in human behavior.

In How and Why Thoughts Change, Dr. Ian Evans deconstructs the nature of cognitive therapy by examining the cognitive element of CBT, that is, how and why thoughts change behavior and emotion. There are a number of different approaches to cognitive therapy, including the classic Beck approach, the late Albert Ellis's rational-emotive psychotherapy, Young's schema-focused therapy, and newer varieties such as mindfulness training, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and problem-solving strategies. Evans identifies the common principles underlying these methods, attempts to integrate them, and makes suggestions as to how our current cognitive therapies might be improved. He draws on a broad survey of contemporary research on basic cognitive processes and integrates these with therapeutic approaches.

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.