Awards

• Winner of Choice Magazine Outstanding Reference/Academic Book Award 2009
• Winner of Choice Magazine Outstanding Reference/Academic Book Award 2009.

Overview

In this groundbreaking look at the evolution of our brains, eminent neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger uncover the mysteries of the outsize intelligence of our ancestors, who had bigger brains than humans living today. Weaving together history, science, and the latest theories of artificial intelligence, Lynch and Granger demystify the complexities of our brains, and show us how our memory, cognition, and intelligence actually function, as well as what mechanisms in the brain can potentially be enhanced, improving on the current design. Author of The Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux praised it as ""provocative and fascinating,"" and, writing in the New Scientist, Willian Calvin called it ""a popular account of how brains enlarge, in both evolutionary and developmental terms"" and ""a much needed book.""

Full Product Details

9781403979797

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Reviews

'On a planet in which everything seems to be getting bigger (the internet), hotter (our climate) or more numerous (the world's population), Gary Lynch and Rick Granger reveal the intriguing possibility that people with larger brains than us may have been around a few thousand years ago. Their account of the mysteries of the brain and intelligence challenges conventional views in a scholarly yet wonderfully accessible manner' - Prof. Richard Morris, Director, Centre for Cognitive and Neural Systems, University of Edinburgh, UK, President, Federation of European Neuroscience Societies, Former chair, Brain Research Association of the United Kingdom 'The Lynch and Grainger combination is like mixing gas with fire. In this book there are big, explosive ideas by two ingenious brain scientists' - Michael Gazzaniga, author of The Ethical Brain 'The brain makes all our hopes, dreams, and fears possible. How did it come to be this way? Look no further than this book. This fascinating and provocative account of the human brain's recent past reminds us that the thing that makes us who we are is a continuously changing organ, and begs the question of where our species is headed next' - Joseph LeDoux, author of The Emotional Brain 'I've been waiting for someone to write this book for years. I almost wrote it myself, twice, but was distracted by other projects. Now Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have written a much-needed book on big brains' -William H Calvin, New Scientist

Author Information

GARY LYNCH is a professor at the University of California, Irvine, USA. He is the author of more than 550 scientific publications that are among the most cited in the field of neuroscience. He is the co-inventor of a novel family of cognition-enhancing drugs called ampakines. He has been featured in major television networks, newspapers, and magazines ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Popular Science. RICHARD GRANGER is W.H. Neukom Distinguished Professor of Computational Science and of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth, USA. He has been the principal architect of a series of advanced computational systems for military, commercial and medical applications, and co-inventor of FDA-approved devices and drugs. His work has been highlighted in numerous popular press and television features, including recent stories in Forbes, Wired, and on CNN.

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