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

[Stevan Harnad]

    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 at 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."

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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 at 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