Making Space
How the Brain Knows Where Things Are
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- 27٫99 US$
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- 27٫99 US$
وصف الناشر
Knowing where things are seems effortless. Yet our brains devote tremendous computational power to figuring out the simplest details about spatial relationships. Going to the grocery store or finding our cell phone requires sleuthing and coordination across different sensory and motor domains. Making Space traces this mental detective work to explain how the brain creates our sense of location. But it goes further, to make the case that spatial processing permeates all our cognitive abilities, and that the brain’s systems for thinking about space may be the systems of thought itself.
Our senses measure energy in the form of light, sound, and pressure on the skin, and our brains evaluate these measurements to make inferences about objects and boundaries. Jennifer Groh describes how eyes detect electromagnetic radiation, how the brain can locate sounds by measuring differences of less than one one-thousandth of a second in how long they take to reach each ear, and how the ear’s balance organs help us monitor body posture and movement. The brain synthesizes all this neural information so that we can navigate three-dimensional space.
But the brain’s work doesn’t end there. Spatial representations do double duty in aiding memory and reasoning. This is why it is harder to remember how to get somewhere if someone else is driving, and why, if we set out to do something and forget what it was, returning to the place we started can jog our memory. In making space the brain uses powers we did not know we have.
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In manual-like prose, Duke University neurobiologist Groh describes complex tactics our brains employ simply to tell us where we and other objects are. Our senses guide spatial processing, she says, but memory is key, too. Ants, who travel far to bring food to the nest, offer proof that memory fuels navigation. When researchers placed some ants on stilts, and shortened the legs of others, the stilted ants overshot the nest, and their short-legged brethren undershot it. The conclusion: ants "count" steps. As Groh progresses, she notes that "memory aids our sense of space, and our sense of space helps us remember." She details how excitatory and inhibitory neurons and synapses forge and are forged by the sensory maps and quantitative meters in the brain that help orchestrate the above. Groh postulates that the way the brain thinks about location may echo the way it thinks, period. As cognitive brain areas share space with areas dedicated to space and movement, "perhaps thinking' also involves activating some subset of sensory and motor pathways." Groh's technical little tome lacks the metaphors and stories that make science accessible, but the exciting neuroscience frontier it traverses may keep intensely curious readers following.
