Physics in Mind

No one can escape a sense of wonder when reflecting on the workings of the mind. We see, we hear, we feel, we are aware of the world around us--all this by virtue of the mind. But what is the mind? What do we mean when we say we are "aware" of something? In Physics in Mind, eminent biophysicist Wern [...]
Visa längre beskrivning

No one can escape a sense of wonder when reflecting on the workings of the mind. We see, we hear, we feel, we are aware of the world around us--all this by virtue of the mind. But what is the mind? What do we mean when we say we are "aware" of something? In Physics in Mind, eminent biophysicist Werner R. Loewenstein seeks answers to these perplexing questions in the mechanisms of physics. Bringing information theory--the idea that all information can be quantified and encoded in bits--to bear on recent advances in the neurosciences, Loewenstein reveals inside the brain a web of immense computational power capable of rendering a coherent representation of the world outside. He guides us on an exhilarating journey along the sensory data stream of the brain--the stream that nurses our cognitions--and we see how the vast amounts of information coming in from the world outside get processed by the web, how its neurons gradually extract meaning from this hodgepodge, and how they arrive at a coherent picture of the world. The roots of the mystery of mind, Loewenstein argues, reach deep into our distant past, to a time in evolution when subatomic information was all there was to process.And so he takes us to the ground floor of the brain, where the strange rules of quantum logic hold sway. There we meet the prime movers of the sensory-information stream, a remarkable breed of biomolecules capable of ultrafast computing. Here he unravels the secret of how they manage to wrench information from the strange, but virtually inexhaustible, quantum world. At once playful and deeply learned, Physics in Mind offers an illuminating new theory of how our minds work.