Mind as Mosaic : The Robot in the Machine - Softcover

Professor Hinrich's writes with exceptional clarity on a very complex subject. Few people understand the working of the brain but Mind as Mosaic goes a long way in clarifying the complex relationship of the brain to the world around us and to our own behavior. The question of what is the mind, of what the mind is composed, and from where the mind originates lies at the center of our understanding of the human condition and our place in the evolution of life on this planet. Hinrich's avoids pedantry and technical jargon but never diminishes the importance of his subject. The reader comes away from reading Mind as Mosaic with a deeper insight and understanding of what makes humans unique from any other species on earth, yet also with knowledge of the similarities between all life forms.

Woody Allen has called the brain his second favorite organ. Today there is likely no more interesting, puzzling, or tantalizing problem than how our emotions, thoughts, perceptions, memories, dreams and other mental phenomena are created by the complex sparking and squirting of the living cells in our heads. How precisely do biological functions produce mental phenomena? This puzzle has intrigued me since my undergraduate days at the University of Minnesota where I was fortunateto meet the esteemed psychologists B. F. Skinner and Jean Piaget. My experience as a psychology professor for over twenty years (including at the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Century College in St. Paul, Minnesota) provided me the opportunity to research and muse on this beguiling question, and now to write Mind as Mosaic, a book that presents the history of ideas regarding the mind-body problem as well as the most up-to-date research findings about our fascinating brains. While the mind-body problem for the most part remains a stubborn enigma, new findings and methodologies in brain-imaging technology, cognitive psychology research, and advances in artificial intelligence are providing a remarkably robust description of how mind emanates from brain. Though none of us have seen our own brain (we have no empirical evidence of its existence), nevertheless, we undeniably accept that its gooey, mushy workings inside our craniums produce the essence of our mental lives. Diseases and damage to the brain, such as Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, and aphasia, provide remarkable evidence that the brain is where it's at. Mind as Mosaic was written with the hopes of illuminating some of the issues, problems, and answers that contemporary research in cognitive neuroscience is providing. The subjects include not only psychology, but philosophy, history, physiology, quantum physics, and computational science. The subject is broad nearly beyond grasp, deep nearly beyond comprehension, and fascinating nearly beyond our wildest dreams. I hope that my book will inform and entertain readers, that their minds will be satisfied and enriched, and that their brains will become their favorite organs. --Bruce H. Hinrichs, Minneapolis