The Postmodern Brain

Download or read book The Postmodern Brain written by Gordon G. Globus and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary work discloses an unexpected coherence between recent concepts in brain science and postmodern thought. A nonlinear dynamical model of brain states is viewed as an autopoietic, autorhoetic, self-organizing, self-tuning eruption under multiple constraints and guided by an overarching optimization principle which insures conservation of invariances and enhancement of symmetries. The nonlinear dynamical brain as developed shows quantum nonlocality, undergoes chaotic regimes, and does not compute. Heidegger and Derrida are appropriated as dynamical theorists who are concerned respectively with the movement of time and being ("Ereignis") and text ("Differance"). The chasm between postmodern thought and the thoroughly metaphysical theory that the brain computes is breached, once the nonlinear dynamical framework is adopted. The book is written in a postmodern style, making playful, opportunistic use of marginalia and dreams, and presenting a nonserial surface of broken complexity. (Series A)