Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On The Matter of the Mind

Second Hand

Excellent Condition

We are on the brink of understanding ancient mysteries: how we know, what governs our nature, what makes a person different from a thing.

In the last decade, more than twenty disciplines dealing with every aspect of the brain have contributed to a revolution in the neurosciences--a revolution as significant, in the view of many observers, as the Galilean and Copernican revolutions in mathematics and physics or the Darwinian revolution in biology.

In this book, one of the world's foremost brain scientists gives us a glimpse into the workings of the human brain--the most complex material object in the universe. A match head's worth of the brain contains about a billion connections that can combine in ways which can only be described as hyperastronomical--on the order of ten followed by millions of zeros (there are only about ten followed by eighty zeros' worth of positively charged particles in the whole known universe).

This sweeping book considers our place in nature and how we came to be able to describe and change it. It examines the implications of understanding the brain for philosophy, for curing mental disease, and for the possibility of building conscious artifacts.

Edelman does not hesitate to take on cognitive and behavioral approaches that leave biology out of the picture, as well as the currently fashionable view of the brain as a computer.