Splendours and miseries of the brain: love, creativity and the quest for human happiness

Splendors and Miseries of the Brain examines the elegant and efficient machinery of the brain, showing that by studying music, art, literature, and love, we can reach important conclusions about how the brain functions. The book, whose title is derived from the novel of Balzac entitled Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, tries to show that there is a huge price to pay, in terms of human happiness, for the enormously elegant and efficient machinery of the brain. INDICE: Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I. Abstraction and the Brain.1. Abstraction. 2. The Brain and Its Concepts. 3. Inherited Brain Concepts. 4. The Distributed Knowledge-Acquiring System of the Brain. 5. The Acquired Synthetic Brain Concepts. 6. The Synthetic Brain Concept and the Platonic Ideal. 7. Creativity and the Source of Perfection in the Brain. Part II. Brain Concepts and Ambiguity. 8. Ambiguity in the Brain and in Art. 9. Processing and Perceptual Sites in the Brain. 10. >From Unambiguous to Ambiguous Knowledge. 11. Higher Levels of Ambiguity. Part III. Unachievable Brain Concepts. Introduction. 12. Michelangelo and the non-finito. 13. Paul Cezanne and the Unfinished. 14. Unfinished Art in Literature. Part VI. Brain Concepts of Love. Conte By Arthur Rimbaud, in English and in French. 15. The Brain's Concepts of Love. 16. The Neural Correlates of Love. 17. Brain Concepts of Unity and Annihilation in Love. 18. Sacred and Profane. 19. The Metamorphosis of the Brain Concept of Love in Dante. 20. Wagner and Tristan und Isolde. 21. Thomas Mann and Death in Venice. 22. A neurobiological analysis of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents

• ISBN: 978-1-4051-8557-8
• Editorial: Blackwell
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 240
• Fecha Publicación: 07/11/2008
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés