Research Catalog

The mind's past

Title: The mind's past / Michael S. Gazzaniga.
Author: Gazzaniga, Michael S.
Publication: Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, [1998], ©1998.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	QP360 .G392 1998	Off-site

Description

xv, 201 pages : illustrations; 19 cm

Summary

Why does the human brain insist on interpreting the world and constructing a narrative? Michael S. Gazzaniga shows how our mind and brain accomplish the amazing feat of constructing our past - a process clearly fraught with errors of perception, memory, and judgment. By showing that the specific systems built into our brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness, Gazzaniga calls into question our everyday notions of self and reality.
The implications of his ideas reach deeply into the nature of perception and memory, the profundity of human instinct, and the ways we construct who we are and how we fit into the world around us.
Gazzaniga explains how the mind interprets data the brain has already processed, making "us" the last to know. He shows how what "we" see is frequently an illusion and not at all what our brain is perceiving. False memories become a part of our experience; autobiography is fiction. In exploring how the brain enables the mind, Gazzaniga points us toward one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution: how we become who we are.

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Bibliography (note)

ISBN

0520213203 (hardcover : alk. paper)

LCCN

97032505

OCLC

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries