1st Edition
The Ecological Brain Unifying the Sciences of Brain, Body, and Environment
1. Making everybody upset 2. Why “ecological” psychology? 3. The sins of cognitivism visited upon neuroscience 4. The varieties of ecological neuroscience 5. Foundations of complexity science for the mind sciences 6. What is NExT? NeuroEcological Nexus Theory 7. Putting the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory to work 8. Conclusion
Biography
Luis H. Favela is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida, USA, and is a fellow with the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. His research is interdisciplinary, situated at the intersections of the cognitive sciences, experimental psychology, and the philosophies of mind and science.
"The brain is just a brain. It has no function without the body and the environmental niche it occupies. The Ecological Brain is an attempt to explain this trivial yet often neglected embeddedness, integrating recent knowledge from psychology and neuroscience research." György Buzsáki, M.D., Ph.D., Biggs Professor of Neural Sciences, NYU Neuroscience Institute, New York University, USA
"After decades of asking what your head’s inside of, ecological psychologists are beginning to ask, “what's inside your head?” In The Ecological Brain, Luis Favela takes seriously the claim that mind is low-dimensional dynamics in a brain-body-environment system. By synthesizing complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics, and recent work on neural manifolds, he points a way forward for understanding perception and action at neural, organism, and ecological scales." William H. Warren, Chancellor’s Professor of Cognitive Science, Brown University, USA
