Neuroscience

This Open Access book presents the current state of the art knowledge on social and affective neuroscience based on empirical findings. This volume is divided into several sections first guiding the reader through important theoretical topics within affective neuroscience, social neuroscience and moral emotions, and clinical neuroscience. Each chapter addresses everyday social interactions and various aspects of social interactions from a different angle taking the reader on a diverse journey. The last section of the book is of methodological nature. Basic information is presented for the reader to learn about common methodologies used in neuroscience alongside advanced input to deepen the understanding and usability of these methods in social and affective neuroscience for more experienced readers.

Information from neuroscience is growing and being properly used, and misused wich makes it imperative that educators receive accurate and practical information. This book provides the accurate and practical information educators (pre-service and in-service) and caregivers serving children birth through age 8 need to know. This volume takes a practical and cautionary stance. It reminds educators to consider the ethical implications of neuroscience when it is applied to education, reviews current findings from neuroscience and reveals the dangers of oversimplification and inappropriate extensions of neuroscience into curricula. It brings together a group of authors with varied expertise writing on an array of inter-related educational topics that will help educators use neuroscience to understand and address the cognitive, emotional, social, and behavioral needs of all young children, including those with exceptionalities. They believe neuroscience can be insightful and useful to educators if applied ethically and with care. The book offers strategies educators and caregivers can use to affect children today and the adults they can become.

How the cerebral cortex operates near a critical phase transition point for optimum performance. Individual neurons have limited computational powers, but when they work together, it is almost like magic. Firing synchronously and then breaking off to improvise by themselves, they can be paradoxically both independent and interdependent. This happens near the critical point- when neurons are poised between a phase where activity is damped and a phase where it is amplified, where information processing is optimized, and complex emergent activity patterns arise. The claim that neurons in the cortex work best when they operate near the critical point is known as the criticality hypothesis. In this book John Beggs-one of the pioneers of this hypothesis-offers an introduction to the critical point and its relevance to the brain. Drawing on recent experimental evidence, Beggs first explains the main ideas underlying the criticality hypotheses and emergent phenomena. He then discusses the critical point and its two main consequences-first, scale-free properties that confer optimum information processing; and second, universality, or the idea that complex emergent phenomena, like that seen near the critical point, can be explained by relatively simple models that are applicable across species and scale. Finally, Beggs considers future directions for the field, including research on homeostatic regulation, quasicriticality, and the expansion of the cortex and intelligence. An appendix provides technical material; many chapters include exercises that use freely available code and data sets.