Human Communication and the Brain: Building the Foundation for the Field of Neurocommunications, by Donald B. Egolf, provides an introduction to the latest neuroscience research and expands its applications to the study of communication. Egolf explores both methodological and ethical issues that are surfacing as a result of the newest findings, revealing important new questions about the nature of communication and the brain, including: is there a way to communicate directly with the brain? What outside powers should be permitted to access that method of information dissemination? Egolf’s text has implications for a number of communication subsets, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, political, marketing, and deception, and this new research undoubtedly will provoke debate amongst communication and neuroscience scholars for years to come.

Human Communication and the Brain: Building the Foundation for the Field of Neurocommunications, by Donald B. Egolf, provides an introduction to the latest neuroscience research and expands its applications to the study of communication. Egolf explores both methodological and ethical issues that are surfacing as a result of the newest findings, revealing important new questions about the nature of communication and the brain, including: is there a way to communicate directly with the brain? What outside powers should be permitted to access that method of information dissemination? Egolf's text has implications for a number of communication subsets, including intrapersonal, interpersonal, political, marketing, and deception, and this new research undoubtedly will provoke debate amongst communication and neuroscience scholars for years to come.

This is a book about speech and language. It is primarily intended for those interested in speech and its neurophysiological bases: phoneticians, linguists, educators, speech therapists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Although speech and language are its central topic, it provides information about related topics as well (e.g. structure and functioning of the central nervous system, research methods in neuroscience, theories and models of speech production and perception, learning, and memory). Data on clinical populations are given in parallel with studies of healthy subjects because such comparisons can give a better understanding of intact and disordered speech and language functions. There is a review of literature (more than 600 sources) and research results covering areas such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, development of the nervous system, sex differences, history of neurolinguistics, behavioral, neuroimaging and other research methods in neuroscience, linguistics and psychology, theories and models of the nervous system function including speech and language processing, kinds of memory and learning and their neural substrates, critical periods, various aspects of normal speech and language processes (e.g. phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, reading), bilingualism, speech and language disorders, and many others. Newcomers to the field of neurolinguistics will find it as readable as professionals will because it is organized in a way that gives the readers flexibility and an individual approach to the text. The language is simple but all the technical terms are provided, explained, and illustrated. A comprehensive glossary provides additional information.

An eye-opening game-changer of a book that sheds new light on how horses learn, think, perceive, and perform, and explains how to work with the horse’s brain instead of against it. In this illuminating book, brain scientist and horsewoman Janet Jones describes human and equine brains working together. Using plain language, she explores the differences and similarities between equine and human ways of negotiating the world. Mental abilities—like seeing, learning, fearing, trusting, and focusing—are discussed from both human and horse perspectives. Throughout, true stories of horses and handlers attempting to understand each other—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—help to illustrate the principles. Horsemanship of every kind depends on mutual interaction between equine and human brains. When we understand the function of both, we can learn to communicate with horses on their terms instead of ours. By meeting horses halfway, we achieve many goals. We improve performance. We save valuable training time. We develop much deeper bonds with our horses. We handle them with insight and kindness instead of force or command. We comprehend their misbehavior in ways that allow solutions. We reduce the human mistakes we often make while working with them. Instead of working against the horse’s brain, expecting him to function in unnatural and counterproductive ways, this book provides the information needed to ride with the horse’s brain. Each principle is applied to real everyday issues in the arena or on the trail, often illustrated with true stories from the author’s horse training experience. Horse Brain, Human Brain offers revolutionary ideas that should be considered by anyone who works with horses.

A leading expert on evolution and communication presents an empirically based theory of the evolutionary origins of human communication that challenges the dominant Chomskian view. Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction. Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices. Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans' cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

This monograph is based on 20 years of research with patients who have experienced pathology in one hemisphere of the brain. It deals with brain mechanisms in human communicative behavior, and with related motor functions, from a broadly biological point of view. In so doing, the work discusses the possible evolutionary origins of human communication, the relation of brain mechanisms in communicative behavior to analogous nonhuman behaviors, and the neural systems involved in various levels and kinds of communication. In addition, noncommunicative mechanisms which parallel those used in communication--such as manual and oral praxis, and constructional behavior-- are outlined in detail. Individual differences in brain organization for such functions, related to hand preference and sex, are also explored. Although there is extensive reference to central nervous system pathology, the emphasis throughout is on how the findings contribute to understanding normal brain mechanisms. Much new data is presented along with the theoretical treatment of human communication which emphasizes a behavioral rather than a linguistic approach. This in turn provides continuity with nonhuman primates and early hominids. The work will interest psycholinguists, cognitive psychologists, neurologists, clinical neuropsychologists, speech pathologists, and advanced students in these fields.

This book is an entry into the fierce current debate among psycholinguists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary theorists about the nature and origins of human language. A prominent neuroscientist here takes up the Darwinian case, using data seldom considered by psycholinguists and neurolinguists to argue that human language--though more sophisticated than all other forms of animal communication--is not a qualitatively different ability from all forms of animal communication, does not require a quantum evolutionary leap to explain it, and is not unified in a single language instinct. Using clinical evidence from speech-impaired patients, functional neuroimaging, and evolutionary biology to make his case, Philip Lieberman contends that human language is not a single separate module but a functional neurological system made up of many separate abilities. Language remains as it began, Lieberman argues: a device for coping with the world. But in a blow to human narcissism, he makes the case that this most remarkable human ability is a by-product of our remote reptilian ancestors' abilities to dodge hazards, seize opportunities, and live to see another day.