AUTONOMOUS BRAIN/Milner: PSYC Call for Book Reviewers (673 lines)

PSYCOLOQUY CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWERS Below is the Abstract of "The Autonomous Brain" by Peter M Milner This book has been selected for multiple review in Psycoloquy. If you wish to submit a formal book review please write to psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu indicating what expertise you would bring to bear on reviewing the book if you were selected to review it. (If you have never reviewed for PSYCOLOQUY or Behavioral & Brain Sciences before, it would be helpful if you could also append a copy of your CV to your inquiry.) If you are selected as one of the reviewers and do not have a copy of the book, you will be sent a copy of the book directly by the publisher (please let us know if you have a copy already). Reviews may also be submitted without invitation, but all reviews will be refereed. The author will reply to all accepted reviews. FULL PSYCOLOQUY BOOK REVIEW INSTRUCTIONS AT: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ Psycoloquy reviews are of the book not the Precis. Length should be about 200 lines [c. 1800 words], with a short abstract (about 50 words), an indexable title, and reviewer's full name and institutional address, email and Home Page URL. All references that are electronically accessible should also have URLs. AUTHOR'S RATIONALE FOR SOLICITING MULTIPLE REVIEW: "I hope this book will attract the attention of psychologists, philosophers and others interested in the mind, to some advances in neuroscience that are relevant to cognition. In particular, I think the idea that the neural processes involved in motivation and intention play an essential role in the learning of percepts should be more widely recognised. I acknowledge that no single person can hope to be well informed about the entire fields of neuroscience and cognition and it is my hope that multiple reviews of the work by experts may expose the inevitable inaccuracies and gaps, providing a partial substitute for multiple authorship. Having a number of reviews in one readily accessible place would provide a valuable resource for the reader." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- psycoloquy.99.10.071.autonomous-brain.1.milner Mon Dec 20 1999 ISSN 1055-0143 (50 paragraphs, 20 references, 620 lines) PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) Copyright 1999 Peter M Milner THE AUTONOMOUS BRAIN [Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.155 pp. ISBN: 0-8058-3211-4] Precis of Milner on Autonomous-Brain Peter M. Milner McGill University Department of Psychology 1205 Dr. Penfield Ave. Montreal, QC. CANADA H3A 1B1 ps64(a)musica.mcgill.ca ABSTRACT: This book presents a theory of behaviour based on the premise that nervous systems have evolved to enable animals to engage in a variety of useful activities. Information about the outside world is essential for most of these activities, but the theory that sensory input must shape its own information processing system is rejected. After the behaviourists banished the immaterial self from psychology they replaced it by stimulus input, and for many years behaviour was attributed entirely to sensory input. Only recently has the notion started to develop that it is the response mechanism of the brain that determines what stimuli are required to perform an action. In the model presented here, an executive system located in the frontal region of the brain employs the extensive reciprocal connections of the sensory cortex to select the input needed to guide the motor system. The consequences of having an autonomous response planner, instead of one subservient to outside stimuli, are far reaching. Neural representations of broad categories that can coexist with multiple distinct subclasses, and the related phenomenon of stimulus equivalence, become easier to understand, for example. It may also enable us to understand why we usually think that we make our own decisions. The book also has suggestions about the way serial order is learned and the role of the frontal regions of the brain in reinforcement, expectancy and response planning. KEYWORDS: association of ideas, attention, behaviour model, intention, motivation, self, serial order Full text of Precis of book available at: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.071 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1999.volume.10/ psyc.99.10.071.autonomous-brain.1.milner