Overview

The big question in the science of psychology is: why is human cognition and behavior so different from the capabilities of every other animal species on Earth - including our close genetic relations, the chimpanzees? This book provides a coherent answer by examining those aspects of the human brain that have made triadic forms of perception and cognition possible. Mechanisms of dyadic association sufficiently explain animal perception, cognition and behavior, but a three-way associational mechanism is required to explain the human talents for language, tool-making, harmony perception, pictorial depth perception and the joint attention that underlies all forms of social cooperation.

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'Cook's unique thesis is that the human mind emerged from two related evolutionary changes: triadic sensory processing and cerebral laterality. In making stone tools, our early ancestors learned how to handle visual, auditory and touch information simultaneously in posterior association cortex. But, in making tools they were obliged to train one hand (hemisphere) to be the motor executive. Precisely because the other 'non-dominant' hemisphere was not an executive, it developed its own talents for various types of configurational processing: face recognition, harmony perception, language prosody and other holistic processes not requiring executive control.' Theodor Landis, University of Geneva

Author Information

Norman D. Cook has authored three books on human psychology, Stability and Flexibility (1980), The Brain Code (1986) and Tone of Voice and Mind (2002). He has also published articles in numerous journals, including Nature, Perception, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Brain, American Scientist, Behavioral Science, Empirical Aesthetics, Music Perception, Spatial Vision, Cognitive Science, Brain and Language, Brain and Cognition, Consciousness and Cognition and Neuroscience. He is currently a professor of cognitive psychology at Kansai University, Osaka.

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