Divided into three essays, this title offers an investigation into the origins of our moral values, or as the author calls them 'moral prejudices'. It addresses the concept of guilt and its role in the development of civilization and religion. It also considers suffering and its role in human existence.

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

Most phobias are focussed on a small number of fear-inducing stimuli (e.g., snakes, spiders). A review of the evidence supporting biological and cognitive explanations of this uneven distribution of phobias suggests that the readiness with which such stimuli become associated with aversive outcomes arises from biases in the processing of information about threatening stimuli rather than from phylogenetically based associative predispositions or “biological preparedness.” This cognitive bias, consisting of a heightened expectation of aversive outcomes following fear-relevant stimuli, generates and maintains (...) robust learned associations between them. Some of the features of such stimuli which determine this expectancy bias are estimates of how dangerous they are, the semiotic similarity between them and their aversive outcomes, and the degree of prior fear they elicit. Ontogenetic and cultural factors influence these features of fear-relevant stimuli and are hence important in determining expectancy bias. The available evidence does not exclude the possibility that both expectancy biases and specific evolved predispositions coexist, but the former can explain a number of important findings that the latter cannot. (shrink)

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

This is a unique book. It is excellently written, crammed with information, wise and a pleasure to read.' ---Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts University.

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs) accompanying sleep paralysis (SP) are often cited as sources of accounts of supernatural nocturnal assaults and paranormal experiences. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably consistent across time and cultures and consistent also with known mechanisms of REM states. A three-factor structural model of HHEs based on their relations both to cultural narratives and REM neurophysiology is developed and tested with several large samples. One factor, labeled Intruder, consisting of sensed presence, fear, and auditory and visual (...) hallucinations, is conjectured to originate in a hypervigilant state initiated in the midbrain. Another factor, Incubus, comprising pressure on the chest, breathing difficulties, and pain, is attributed to effects of hyperpolarization of motoneurons on perceptions of respiration. These two factors have in common an implied alien ''other'' consistent with occult narratives identified in numerous contemporary and historical cultures. A third factor, labeled Unusual Bodily Experiences, consisting of floating/flying sensations, out-of-body experiences, and feelings of bliss, is related to physically impossible experiences generated by conflicts of endogenous and exogenous activation related to body position, orientation, and movement. Implications of this last factor for understanding of orientational primacy in self-consciousness are considered. Central features of the model developed here are consistent with recent work on hallucinations associated with hypnosis and schizophrenia. (shrink)

Females' tendency to place a high value on protecting their own lives enhanced their reproductive success in the environment of evolutionary adaptation because infant survival depended more upon maternal than on paternal care and defence. The evolved mechanism by which the costs of aggression (and other forms of risk taking) are weighted more heavily for females may be a lower threshold for fear in situations which pose a direct threat of bodily injury. Females' concern with personal survival also has implications (...) for sex differences in dominance hierarchies because the risks associated with hierarchy formation in nonbonded exogamous females are not offset by increased reproductive success. Hence among females, disputes do not carry implications for status with them as they do among males, but are chiefly connected with the acquisition and defence of scarce resources. Consequently, female competition is more likely to take the form of indirect aggression or low-level direct combat than among males. Under patriarchy, men have held the power to propagate images and attributions which are favourable to the continuance of their control. Women's aggression has been viewed as a gender-incongruent aberration or dismissed as evidence of irrationality. These cultural interpretations have evolutionarily based sex differences by a process of imposition which stigmatises the expression of aggression by females and causes women to offer exculpatory (rather than justificatory) accounts of their own aggression. (shrink)

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a part of the brain's limbic system. Classically, this region has been related to affect, on the basis of lesion studies in humans and in animals. In the late 1980s, neuroimaging research indicated that ACC was active in many studies of cognition. The findings from EEG studies of a focal area of negativity in scalp electrodes following an error response led to the idea that ACC might be the brain's error detection and correction device. In (...) this article, these various findings are reviewed in relation to the idea that ACC is a part of a circuit involved in a form of attention that serves to regulate both cognitive and emotional processing. Neuroimaging studies showing that separate areas of ACC are involved in cognition and emotion are discussed and related to results showing that the error negativity is influenced by affect and motivation. In addition, the development of the emotional and cognitive roles of ACC are discussed, and how the success of this regulation in controlling responses might be correlated with cingulate size. Finally, some theories are considered about how the different subdivisions of ACC might interact with other cortical structures as a part of the circuits involved in the regulation of mental and emotional activity. (shrink)

Since the discovery that the characteristics of dreaming sleep are far stronger in Stage 1 rapid eye movement sleep than in any other biological state, investigators have attempted to determine the relative responsibility of the tonic versus the phasic properties of REM sleep for the different characteristics of dreaming–features such as the amount of information in the dream report, the brightness and clarity of the visual images, shifts in thematic continuity, and incongruities of image and meaning. The present experiment is (...) designed to identify dream characteristics that are specifically associated with tonic changes in level of cortical activation within sleep. It samples reports of imagery and thought during spontaneous variations within one phase of the 24-h diurnal rhythm and across the REM-NREM sleep cycle in order to identify the independent and joint contributions of the two cycles to imagery and thought. The rising phase of the diurnal cycle in the late night and morning was estimated from clock time during the late night and early morning and was varied by delaying the sleep onset and waking time of the subjects. Considered together with other studies, the results suggest that the major determinant of vivid visual imagery and enhanced cognitive activity during sleep is a pattern of subcortical and cortical activation that is common to both the REM phase of the REM-NREM cycle and the activated phase of the 24-h diurnal wake-sleep cycle. (shrink)

By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

One of our most original thinkers addresses the scientific world's premier question: What is the nature of consciousness?

One of science's greatest intellects examines how people and animals display fear, anger, and pleasure. Darwin based this 1872 study on his personal observations, which anticipated later findings in neuroscience. Abounding in anecdotes and literary quotations, the book is illustrated with 21 figures and seven photographic plates. Its direct approach, accessible to professionals and amateurs alike, continues to inspire and inform modern research in psychology.

This book, based on Jaegwon Kim's 1996 Townsend Lectures, presents the philosopher's current views on a variety of issues in the metaphysics of the mind...

It is traditionally believed that cerebral activation (the presence of low voltage fast electrical activity in the neocortex and rhythmical slow activity in the hippocampus) is correlated with arousal, while deactivation (the presence of large amplitude irregular slow waves or spindles in both the neocortex and the hippocampus) is correlated with sleep or coma. However, since there are many exceptions, these generalizations have only limited validity. Activated patterns occur in normal sleep (active or paradoxical sleep) and during states of anesthesia (...) and coma. Deactivated patterns occur, at times, during normal waking, or during behavior in awake animals treated with atropinic drugs. Also, the fact that patterns characteristic of sleep, arousal, and waking behavior continue in decorticate animals indicates that reticulo-cortical mechanisms are not essential for these aspects of behavior. (shrink)

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

To test the notion that shifts in visual imagery and attention are correlated with experiences of emotion, we studied 10 dream reports using an affirmative probe of emotion and a quantitative measure of plot discontinuity. We found that emotion, especially changes in emotion, are correlated with discontinuities in visual imagery. These correlations are quantified using a new graph theoretical method for analyzing narrative reports.

A novel "dream splicing" technique allows the objective evaluation of thematic coherence in dreams. In this study, dream reports were cut into segments and segments randomly recombined to form spliced reports. Judges then attempted to distinguish spliced reports from intact ones. Five judges correctly scored 22 spliced and intact reports 82% of the time ; 13 of the 22 reports were correctly scored by all five judges . We conclude that most dream reports contain sufficient coherence to allow judges to (...) distinguish intact from spliced reports. In contrast, abridged reports, which had all but their first and last five lines removed, were correctly identified in only 10 of 38 reports, suggesting that thematic continuity does not normally extend from the beginning to the end of dreams. The continuity identified in this minority of the reports depended on easily identifiable features, such as specific characters, objects, locations, and emotions, rather than on "latent" themes. (shrink)

The "Nightcap," a relatively nonintrusive and "user-friendly" sleep monitoring system, was used by 11 subjects on 10 consecutive nights in their homes. Eighty-eight sleep mentation reports were obtained after spontaneous awakenings from Nightcap-identified REM sleep and 61 were obtained from NREM awakenings. Sleep mentation was recalled in 83% of REM reports and 54% of NREM reports. The median length of REM reports was 148 words compared to 21 words for NREM reports. Twenty-four percent of the REM reports were over 500 (...) words long; no NREM reports over 500 words were obtained. REM report lengths were lowest during the first 15 min of the REM cycle and longest 15–45 min into the period. In contrast, 7 of the 9 NREM reports more than 100 words long occurred within the first 15 min of NREM periods. The Nightcap thus appears to be an effective and efficient method of collecting large numbers of sleep mentation reports with correlated sleep staging under normal ecological conditions. (shrink)

The nature and time course of sleep onset mentation was studied in the home environment using the Nightcap, a reliable, cost-effective, and relatively noninvasive sleep monitor. The Nightcap, linked to a personal computer, reliably identified sleep onset according to changes in perceived sleepiness and the appearance of hypnagogic dream features. Awakenings were performed by the computer after 15 s to 5 min of sleep as defined by eyelid quiescence. Awakenings from longer periods of sleep were associated with an increase in (...) reported sleepiness, a decrease in the length of mentation reports, a decrease in the frequency of reports of normal, wake-like thoughts, an increase in the frequency of “unusual thoughts,” and increased frequencies of formal dream features, including visual hallucination, self-representation, fictive movement, narrative plot, and bizarreness. While sleep-onset reports can include all features of rapid eye movement dream reports, the number of such features is markedly reduced at sleep onset, suggesting that this mentation is a greatly diminished version of REM dreaming. (shrink)

To extend the hypothesis that bizarre discontinuities in dreams result from the interaction of chaotic, "bottom-up" brainstem activation with "top-down" cortical synthesis, we have performed a detailed analysis of dream discontinuities using a new methodology that allows for objective characterization of this formal dream feature. Transformations of characters and objects in dream reports were found to follow definite associational rules. While there were 11 examples of character–character transformation and 7 of inanimate object–inanimate object transformation, transformations of characters into inanimate objects (...) and vice versa were never observed. Judges′ scores on a transformation-matching task further showed that the nature of the transformed character or object is highly constrained by the features of the initial character or object . We conclude that despite the threat to dream coherence posed by bizarre discontinuities, significant coherence is maintained by associational constraints, especially in the case of object and character transformations. (shrink)

We have conducted a home-based study of children′s dream reports in which parents used open-ended interviewing styles to collect 88 dream reports from their 4- to 10-year-old children in the comfortable and supportive environment of their own homes. Particular attention was paid to formal properties including characters , settings, self-representation, and bizarreness. In contrast to previous studies, our data indicate that young children are able to give long, detailed reports of their dreams that share many formal characteristics with adult dream (...) reports. Because this wide range of dream mentation is only revealed to trusted confidants in a familiar and comfortable environment, an important implication is that the sleep laboratory may not be the best source of naturalistic dream data. (shrink)

As an alternative to establishing awareness thresholds, stimulus contexts in which there were either greater conscious or greater unconscious influences were defined on the basis of performance on an exclusion task. Target words were presented for brief durations and each target word was followed immediately by its three-letter stem. Subjects were instructed to complete each stem with any word other than the target word. With this task, failures to exclude target words indicate greater unconscious influences, whereas successful exclusion indicates greater (...) conscious influences. Conscious influences were dominant at long durations , but unconscious influences were dominant at short durations . Performance on the exclusion task successfully predicated both qualitative differences in Stroop priming and qualitative differences in recognition memory previously associated with the different effects of conscious and unconscious influences. Taken together, these results demonstrate that an exclusion task allows both unconscious and conscious influences to be defined in terms of significant deviations from baseline performance. As such, exclusion tasks provide a method for distinguishing conscious from unconscious influences that does not require establishing thresholds for null awareness. (shrink)

We have investigated the emotional profile of dreams and the relationship between dream emotion and cognition using a form that specifically asked subjects to identify emotions within their dreams. Two hundred dream reports were collected from 20 subjects, each of whom produced 10 reports. Compared to previous studies, our method yielded a 10-fold increase in the amount of emotion reported. Anxiety/fear was reported most frequently, followed, in order, by joy/elation, anger, sadness, shame/guilt, and, least frequently, affection/eroticism. Unexpectedly, there was no (...) significant difference in the profiles of emotion reported by men and women. When the reports were scored for bizarreness, a significant correlation was found between the occurrence of bizarreness and major shifts in emotion. These results support the conclusion that dreaming is a mental state whose general emotional features are widely shared across individuals and strongly linked to cognitive features within individual dreams. (shrink)

In mirror mark tests dolphins twist, posture, and engage in open-mouth and head movements, often repetitive. Because postures and an open mouth are also dolphin social behaviours, we used self-view television as a manipulatable mirror to distinguish between self-examination and social behavior. Two dolphins were exposed to alternating real-time self-view and playback of the same to determine if they distinguished between them. The adult male engaged in elaborate open-mouth behaviors in mirror mode, but usually just watched when playing back the (...) same material. Mirror mode behavior was also compared to interacting with real dolphins . Mark tests were conducted, as well as switches from front to side self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to the self-view television and turned. The results suggest self-examination over social behavior. (shrink)

In mirror mark tests dolphins twist, posture, and engage in open-mouth and head movements, often repetitive. Because postures and an open mouth are also dolphin social behaviours, we used self-view television as a manipulatable mirror to distinguish between self-examination and social behavior. Two dolphins were exposed to alternating real-time self-view and playback of the same to determine if they distinguished between them. The adult male engaged in elaborate open-mouth behaviors in mirror mode, but usually just watched when playing back the (...) same material. Mirror mode behavior was also compared to interacting with real dolphins. Mark tests were conducted, as well as switches from front to side self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to self-views to see if the dolphins turned. They presented marked areas to the self-view television and turned. The results suggest self-examination over social behavior. (shrink)

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history (...) can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, _The Savage Mind_, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas _must_ read it; everyone interested in human institutions _should _read it."—J. H. Plumb, _Saturday Review_ "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, _The Observer_, London. (shrink)

Thirty-eight “practiced” dreamers and 50 “novice” dreamers completed questionnaires assessing the cognitive, metacognitive, and emotional qualities of recent waking and dreaming experiences. The present findings suggest that dreaming cognition is more similar to waking cognition than previously assumed and that the differences between dreaming and waking cognition are more quantitative than qualitative. Results from the two studies were generally consistent, indicating that high-order cognition during dreaming is not restricted to individuals practiced in dream recall or self-observation. None of the measured (...) features was absent or infrequent in reports of either dreaming or waking experiences. Recollections of dreaming and waking experiences were similar for some cognitive features and different for other features. (shrink)

Dreaming is a statistically robust cognitive correlate of REM sleep, but all of its formal features may occur in other states of sleep and even in waking, especially during fantasy. In order to test the hypothesis that the brain basis of such cognitive features as dream bizarreness is to be found in REM sleep neurophysiology, it is critical to quantify bizarreness in dreams and other mental states and to analyze the data with respect to both the magnitude and the kind (...) of bizarreness so measured. Any differences in the cognitive dimensions are candidate correlates of REM sleep neurophysiology. Sixty pairs of home-based dream and fantasy reports were collected from 12 subjects and scored for bizarreness using a two-stage scoring system adapted from Hobson, Hoffman, Helfand, and Kostner . Our results show that bizarreness was twice as prevalent in dream reports as in wake-state fantasy reports of the same subjects. Further analysis of the reports also showed differences in other features including the number of persona and remoteness of time and place. (shrink)

This paper concerns how motor actions are neurally represented and coded. Action planning and motor preparation can be studied using a specific type of representational activity, motor imagery. A close functional equivalence between motor imagery and motor preparation is suggested by the positive effects of imagining movements on motor learning, the similarity between the neural structures involved, and the similar physiological correlates observed in both imaging and preparing. The content of motor representations can be inferred from motor images at a (...) macroscopic level, based on global aspects of the action and the motor rules and constraints which predict the spatial path and kinematics of movements. A more microscopic neural account calls for a representation of object-oriented action. Object attributes are processed in different neural pathways depending on the kind of task the subject is performing. During object-oriented action, a pragmatic representation is activated in which object affordances are transformed into specific motor schemas. Animal as well as human clinical data implicate the posterior parietal and premotor cortical areas in schema instantiation. A mechanism is proposed that is able to encode the desired goal of the action and is applicable to different levels of representational organization. (shrink)

The studies reported in the following articles are aimed at providing a comprehensive, detailed, and quantitative picture of cognition in human dreaming. Our main premises are that waking, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep represent physiologically distinct and identifiable brain states and that the differences between waking, REM, and NREM mentation reflect these physiological differences. We have studied dreams at a formal level of analysis and, in these papers, have studied the specific dream properties of emotions, bizarre transformations, scene shifts, and (...) plot coherence, in adults and 4- to 10-year-old children, as part of a larger effort to map state-dependent mental phenomena back onto the varying neurobiological processes that must underlie them. We believe that such efforts will enhance our understanding not only of dreaming and its neurophysiological substrates, but also of the cognitive processes that dreaming shares with other unusual mental states. (shrink)

Various neurophysiological experiments have revealed remarkable correlations between cortical neuronal activity and subjective experiences. However, the mere presence of neuronal electrical activity does not appear to be sufficient to produce these experiences. It has been suggested that the explanation for the neural basis of consciousness might lie in understanding the reason that some types of neuronal activity possess subjective correlates and others do not. Here I propose and develop the idea that this difference may be caused by the existence of (...) an elementary nonarbitrary linkage between temporal or spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal activity and their subjective attributes. I also show how cortical neural circuits capable of generating experience-coding patterns could emerge during evolution and brain development, due to the presence of spontaneous stochastic neuronal activity and activity-dependent synaptic plasticity. This hypothesis leads to several testable predictions, principal among which is the idea that the neural correlates of consciousness are essentially innate and universal. (shrink)