Chapter Notes
163
By doing this, information becomes easier to retain because a whole Gestalt is
almost as easy to remember as a single item.
11. Immanuel Kant is perhaps the one classical philosopher who most influenced modern thinking. One may find a fairly comprehensive outline of his
work in the entry for Kant online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
3. The Animal Sensorium
1. Sensory neurons signal the brain by firing voltage spikes called action potentials whose pattern varies. The message contained in these signals is coded in
the “firing rate” of the signals, that is, the number of spikes per second. The
message may also be coded by the exact timing of successive spikes. However,
the organization of this code is not understood at this time.
2. An important area of study in neuroscience is the way the brain organizes
actions. The motor cortex receives information on the brain’s intention to act,
and responds by planning the action and generating a sensation of what the
execution will feel like. This is described in Marc Jeannerod, The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Action. A simple discussion of this topic may be found in the
essay How the Brain Prepares For Action in the online journal Neuroscience News,
February 7, 2019.
3. Essays explaining and supporting this position can be found in the volumes
Phenomenal Intentionalty, Uriah Kriegel (2013) and Cognitive Phenomenology,
Bayne and Montague (2011).
4. This is currently an active area of research. Several excellent books have
been written on the topic. The earliest and most readable has the colorful title
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff, University of Chicago
Press, 1987. Another excellent treatment of the subject is Jean Mandler’s The
Foundations of Mind: The Origins of Conceptual Thought, Oxford University
Press, 2004.
5. The concept of r vs. K selection was introduced by the ecologists Robert
MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967. Further details may be found in the
article Life history tactics: a review of the ideas by S. Stearns, 1976, Quarterly
Review of Biology, volume 51, pp. 3–47.
6. The clearest and most informative studies of emotion are those described
by Antonio Damasio in several books. Here, I refer particularly to his volume
titled The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures,
Pantheon Books, 2018.
7. This fascinating topic belongs within a new branch of biology called cognitive
biology. A splendid overview, not too technical, is the article by J.A. Shapiro
entitled Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering
and socio-bacteriology, in Studies in the History & Philosophy of Biological &
Biomedical Science, volume 38, 2007, pp. 807–819.
163
By doing this, information becomes easier to retain because a whole Gestalt is
almost as easy to remember as a single item.
11. Immanuel Kant is perhaps the one classical philosopher who most influenced modern thinking. One may find a fairly comprehensive outline of his
work in the entry for Kant online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
3. The Animal Sensorium
1. Sensory neurons signal the brain by firing voltage spikes called action potentials whose pattern varies. The message contained in these signals is coded in
the “firing rate” of the signals, that is, the number of spikes per second. The
message may also be coded by the exact timing of successive spikes. However,
the organization of this code is not understood at this time.
2. An important area of study in neuroscience is the way the brain organizes
actions. The motor cortex receives information on the brain’s intention to act,
and responds by planning the action and generating a sensation of what the
execution will feel like. This is described in Marc Jeannerod, The Cognitive
Neuroscience of Action. A simple discussion of this topic may be found in the
essay How the Brain Prepares For Action in the online journal Neuroscience News,
February 7, 2019.
3. Essays explaining and supporting this position can be found in the volumes
Phenomenal Intentionalty, Uriah Kriegel (2013) and Cognitive Phenomenology,
Bayne and Montague (2011).
4. This is currently an active area of research. Several excellent books have
been written on the topic. The earliest and most readable has the colorful title
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff, University of Chicago
Press, 1987. Another excellent treatment of the subject is Jean Mandler’s The
Foundations of Mind: The Origins of Conceptual Thought, Oxford University
Press, 2004.
5. The concept of r vs. K selection was introduced by the ecologists Robert
MacArthur and E. O. Wilson in 1967. Further details may be found in the
article Life history tactics: a review of the ideas by S. Stearns, 1976, Quarterly
Review of Biology, volume 51, pp. 3–47.
6. The clearest and most informative studies of emotion are those described
by Antonio Damasio in several books. Here, I refer particularly to his volume
titled The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures,
Pantheon Books, 2018.
7. This fascinating topic belongs within a new branch of biology called cognitive
biology. A splendid overview, not too technical, is the article by J.A. Shapiro
entitled Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering
and socio-bacteriology, in Studies in the History & Philosophy of Biological &
Biomedical Science, volume 38, 2007, pp. 807–819.