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Finding Places: The Search For The Brain's Gps

Author: Unni Eikeseth

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2020-03-23

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 9811216932

Finding Places tells the story of the ground-breaking discovery of the cells that constitute the brain's positioning system — its GPS. The book takes you into the lab of neuroscientists May-Britt and Edvard Moser and lets you experience the work of the many researchers who revealed how certain incredible cells help rats and humans find their way. It details the discovery of the mind-boggling 'grid cells', which generate a hexagonal coordinate system and enable precise positioning and pathfinding. While giving a unique insight into the research process, the author also conveys what these insights mean for you and me. Have you ever wondered how your brain knows where you are, why your memories are tied to places, or why Alzheimer's disease causes people to lose their sense of place? These questions and many more are answered in this book.The author's goal is not only to document a fascinating scientific achievement that has revolutionized our understanding of the brain, but also to offer insight into the nature of science, and the imagination and creativity that lie behind topnotch research.Related Link(s)

Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation

Author: Christopher Kemp

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2022-01-25

Total Pages: 237

ISBN-13: 1324005394

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How the brain helps us to understand and navigate space—and why, sometimes, it doesn’t work the way it should. Inside our heads we carry around an infinite and endlessly unfolding map of the world. Navigation is one of the most ancient neural abilities we have—older than language. In Dark and Magical Places, Christopher Kemp embarks on a journey to discover the remarkable extent of what our minds can do. Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Kemp describes the brain regions that orient us in space and the specialized neurons that do it. Place cells. Grid cells. He examines how the brain plans routes, recognizes landmarks, and makes sure we leave a room through a door instead of trying to leave through a painting. From the secrets of supernavigators like the indigenous hunters of the Bolivian rainforest to the confusing environments inhabited by people with place blindness, Kemp charts the myriad ways in which we find our way and explains the cutting-edge neuroscience behind them. How did Neanderthals navigate? Why do even seasoned hikers stray from the trail? What spatial skills do we inherit from our parents? How can smartphones and our reliance on GPS devices impact our brains? In engaging, engrossing language, Kemp unravels the mysteries of navigating and links the brain’s complex functions to the effects that diseases like Alzheimer’s, types of amnesia, and traumatic brain injuries have on our perception of the world around us. A book for anyone who has ever felt compelled to venture off the beaten path, Dark and Magical Places is a stirring reminder of the beauty in losing yourself to your surroundings. And the beauty in understanding how our brains can guide us home.

Wayfinding

Author: M. R. O'Connor

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Published: 2019-04-30

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1250096960

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At once far flung and intimate, a fascinating look at how finding our way make us human. In this compelling narrative, O'Connor seeks out neuroscientists, anthropologists and master navigators to understand how navigation ultimately gave us our humanity. Biologists have been trying to solve the mystery of how organisms have the ability to migrate and orient with such precision—especially since our own adventurous ancestors spread across the world without maps or instruments. O'Connor goes to the Arctic, the Australian bush and the South Pacific to talk to masters of their environment who seek to preserve their traditions at a time when anyone can use a GPS to navigate. O’Connor explores the neurological basis of spatial orientation within the hippocampus. Without it, people inhabit a dream state, becoming amnesiacs incapable of finding their way, recalling the past, or imagining the future. Studies have shown that the more we exercise our cognitive mapping skills, the greater the grey matter and health of our hippocampus. O'Connor talks to scientists studying how atrophy in the hippocampus is associated with afflictions such as impaired memory, dementia, Alzheimer’s Disease, depression and PTSD. Wayfinding is a captivating book that charts how our species' profound capacity for exploration, memory and storytelling results in topophilia, the love of place. "O'Connor talked to just the right people in just the right places, and her narrative is a marvel of storytelling on its own merits, erudite but lightly worn. There are many reasons why people should make efforts to improve their geographical literacy, and O'Connor hits on many in this excellent book—devouring it makes for a good start." —Kirkus Reviews

From Here to There

Author: Michael Bond

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0674244575

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A wise and insightful exploration of human navigation, what it means to be lost, and how we find our way. How is it that we can walk unfamiliar streets while maintaining a sense of direction? Come up with shortcuts on the fly, in places we’ve never traveled? The answer is the complex mental map in our brains. This feature of our cognition is easily taken for granted, but it’s also critical to our species’ evolutionary success. In From Here to There Michael Bond tells stories of the lost and found—Polynesian sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators—and surveys the science of human navigation. Navigation skills are deeply embedded in our biology. The ability to find our way over large distances in prehistoric times gave Homo sapiens an advantage, allowing us to explore the farthest regions of the planet. Wayfinding also shaped vital cognitive functions outside the realm of navigation, including abstract thinking, imagination, and memory. Bond brings a reporter’s curiosity and nose for narrative to the latest research from psychologists, neuroscientists, animal behaviorists, and anthropologists. He also turns to the people who design and expertly maneuver the world we navigate: search-and-rescue volunteers, cartographers, ordnance mappers, urban planners, and more. The result is a global expedition that furthers our understanding of human orienting in the natural and built environments. A beguiling mix of storytelling and science, From Here to There covers the full spectrum of human navigation and spatial understanding. In an age of GPS and Google Maps, Bond urges us to exercise our evolved navigation skills and reap the surprising cognitive rewards.

Searching Minds by Scanning Brains

Author: Marc Jonathan Blitz

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-03-17

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 331950004X

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This book examines the ethical and legal challenges presented by modern techniques of memory retrieval, especially within the context of potential use by the US government in courts of law. Specifically, Marc Blitz discusses the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause. He also argues that we should pay close attention to another constitutional provision that individuals generally don’t think of as protecting their privacy: The First Amendment’s freedom of speech. First Amendment values also protect our freedom of thought, and this—not simply our privacy—is what is at stake if government engaged in excessive monitoring of our minds.

From Here to There

Author: Michael Bond

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 067424737X

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A Wired Most Fascinating Book of the Year “An important book that reminds us that navigation remains one of our most underappreciated arts.” —Tristan Gooley, author of The Lost Art of Reading Nature’s Signs “If you want to understand what rats can teach us about better-planned cities, why walking into a different room can help you find your car keys, or how your brain’s grid, border, and speed cells combine to give us a sense of direction, this book has all the answers.” —The Scotsman How is it that some of us can walk unfamiliar streets without losing our way, while the rest of us struggle even with a GPS? Navigating in uncharted territory is a remarkable feat if you stop to think about it. In this beguiling mix of science and storytelling, Michael Bond explores how we do it: how our brains make the “cognitive maps” that keep us orientated and how that anchors our sense of wellbeing. Children are instinctive explorers, developing a spatial understanding as they roam. And yet today few of us make use of the wayfinding skills that we inherited from our nomadic ancestors. Bond tells stories of the lost and found—sailors, orienteering champions, early aviators—and explores why being lost can be such a devastating experience. He considers how our understanding of the world around us affects our psychology and helps us see how our reliance on technology may be changing who we are. “Bond concludes that, by setting aside our GPS devices, by redesigning parts of our cities and play areas, and sometimes just by letting ourselves get lost, we can indeed revivify our ability to find our way, to the benefit of our inner world no less than the outer one.” —Science “A thoughtful argument about how our ability to find our way is integral to our nature.” —Sunday Times

Finding North

Author: George Michelsen Foy

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1250053897

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Navigation is the key human skill. It's something we do everywhere, whether feeling our way through a bedroom in the dark, or charting a ship's course. But how does navigation affect our brains, our memory, ourselves? Blending scientific research and memoir, and written in beautiful prose, Finding North starts with a quest by the author to understand this most basic of human skills---and why it's in mortal peril. In 1844, Foy's great-great grandfather, captain of a Norwegian cargo ship, perished at sea after getting lost in a snowstorm. Foy decides to unravel the mystery surrounding Halvor Michelsen's death---and the roots of his own obsession with navigation---by re-creating his ancestor's trip using only period instruments. Beforehand, he meets a colorful cast of characters to learn whether men really have better directional skills than women, how cells, eels, and spaceships navigate; and how tragedy results from GPS glitches. He interviews a cabby who has memorized every street in London, sails on a Haitian cargo sloop, and visits the site of a secret navigational cult in Greece. At the heart of Foy's story is this fact: navigation and the brain's memory centers are inextricably linked. As Foy unravels the secret behind Halvor's death, he also discovers why forsaking our navigation skills in favor of GPS may lead not only to Alzheimers and other diseases of memory, but to losing a key part of what makes us human.

Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Author: Greg Milner

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0393244997

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"One of the most mesmerizing and exhilarating, yet alarming modern technology books…an extraordinary tale." —Gillian Tett, Financial Times Pinpoint tells the fascinating story of a hidden system that touches nearly every aspect of modern life. Tracking the development of GPS from its origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity, Greg Milner examines the technology’s double-edged effect on the way we live, work, and travel. Savvy and original, this sweeping scientific history offers startling insight into how humans understand their place in the world.

The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet

Author: Barney Warf

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 2444

ISBN-13: 1526450437

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The Internet needs no introduction, and its significance today can hardly be exaggerated. Today, more people are more connected technologically to one another than at any other time in human existence. For a large share of the world’s people, the Internet, text messaging, and various other forms of digital social media such as Facebook have become thoroughly woven into the routines and rhythms of daily life. The Internet has transformed how we seek information, communicate, entertain ourselves, find partners, and, increasingly, it shapes our notions of identity and community. The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet addresses the many related topics pertaining to cyberspace, email, the World Wide Web, and social media. Entries will range from popular topics such as Alibaba and YouTube to important current controversies such as Net neutrality and cyberterrorism. The goal of the encyclopedia is to provide the most comprehensive collection of authoritative entries on the Internet available, written in a style accessible to academic and non-academic audiences alike.

The Lost Art of Finding Our Way

Author: John Edward Huth

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-05-15

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 0674072820

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Long before GPS, Google Earth, and global transit, humans traveled vast distances using only environmental clues and simple instruments. John Huth asks what is lost when modern technology substitutes for our innate capacity to find our way. Encyclopedic in breadth, weaving together astronomy, meteorology, oceanography, and ethnography, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way puts us in the shoes, ships, and sleds of early navigators for whom paying close attention to the environment around them was, quite literally, a matter of life and death. Haunted by the fate of two young kayakers lost in a fog bank off Nantucket, Huth shows us how to navigate using natural phenomena—the way the Vikings used the sunstone to detect polarization of sunlight, and Arab traders learned to sail into the wind, and Pacific Islanders used underwater lightning and “read” waves to guide their explorations. Huth reminds us that we are all navigators capable of learning techniques ranging from the simplest to the most sophisticated skills of direction-finding. Even today, careful observation of the sun and moon, tides and ocean currents, weather and atmospheric effects can be all we need to find our way. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 200 specially prepared drawings, Huth’s compelling account of the cultures of navigation will engross readers in a narrative that is part scientific treatise, part personal travelogue, and part vivid re-creation of navigational history. Seeing through the eyes of past voyagers, we bring our own world into sharper view.