This is the eBook version of the printed book. If the print book includes a CD-ROM, this content is not included within the eBook version.
A Deeply Personal Guide to Neuroscience: Its Successes, Failures, and Future
It may be the hardest problem in science: How do our brains really work?
In Brains, one of the field’s leading scientists takes you on a guided tour through the recent history of neuroscience and offers a notion as to where neuroscience may well be headed next.
Purves offers a critical assessment of the paths that neuroscience research has taken, both their successes and their limitations, and then introduces an alternative approach for thinking about brains. Building on new research on visual perception, he shows why common ideas about brain networks can’t be right and uncovers the evolutionary drivers behind complex neural processes.
In this deeply personal book, you’ll gain a new understanding into how brains appear to work--and how world-class scientists work, too.
For 50 years, the world’s most brilliant neuroscientists have struggled to understand how human brains really work. Today, says Dale Purves, the dominant research agenda may have taken us as far as it can--and neuroscientists may be approaching a paradigm shift.
In this highly personal book, Purves reveals how we got here and offers his notion of where neuroscience may be headed next. Purves guides you through a half-century of the most influential ideas in neuroscience and introduces you to the extraordinary scientists and physicians who created and tested them.
Purves offers a critical assessment of the paths that neuroscience research has taken, both their successes and their limitations, and then introduces an alternative approach for thinking about brains. Building on new research on visual perception, he shows why common ideas about brain networks can’t be right and uncovers the evolutionary drivers behind complex neural processes. The resulting insights may offer a deeper understanding of what it means to be human.
Why we need a better conception of what brains are trying to do and how they do it
The dominant research agenda over the past several decades may have taken us as far as it can The surprising lessons that can be learned from what we see
How complex neural processes owe more to evolution than to logical structure Brains—and the people who think about them
Meet the extraordinary individuals who’ve shaped neuroscience The “ghost in the machine” disappears
Is free will, after all, just an illusion?
