Scholarpedia’s Encyclopedia of Touch provides a comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed articles written by leading researchers, detailing our current scientific understanding of tactile sensing and its neural substrates in animals including humans. The encyclopedia allows ideas and insights to be shared between researchers working on different aspects of touch and in different species, including research in synthetic touch systems. In addition, this encyclopedia raises awareness of research in tactile sensing and increases scientific and public interest in the field. The articles address subjects including tactile control, whiskered robots, vibrissal coding, the molecular basis of touch, invertebrate mechanoreception, fingertip transducers and tactile sensing. All the articles in this encyclopedia provide in-depth and state-of-the-art scholarly treatment of the academic topics concerned, making it an excellent reference work for academics, professionals and students.

An examination of the two most radical dissociation syndromes of the human pain experience—pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain—and what they reveal about the complex nature of pain and its sensory, cognitive, and behavioral components. In Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nikola Grahek examines two of the most radical dissociation syndromes to be found in human pain experience: pain without painfulness and painfulness without pain. Grahek shows that these two syndromes—the complete dissociation of the sensory dimension of pain from its affective, cognitive, and behavioral components, and its opposite, the dissociation of pain's affective components from its sensory-discriminative components (inconceivable to most of us but documented by ample clinical evidence)—have much to teach us about the true nature and structure of human pain experience. Grahek explains the crucial distinction between feeling pain and being in pain, defending it on both conceptual and empirical grounds. He argues that the two dissociative syndromes reveal the complexity of the human pain experience: its major components, the role they play in overall pain experience, the way they work together, and the basic neural structures and mechanisms that subserve them. Feeling Pain and Being in Pain does not offer another philosophical theory of pain that conclusively supports or definitively refutes either subjectivist or objectivist assumptions in the philosophy of mind. Instead, Grahek calls for a less doctrinaire and more balanced approach to the study of mind–brain phenomena.

Computational neuroanatomy is an emerging field that utilizes various non-invasive brain imaging modalities, such as MRI and DTI, in quantifying the spatiotemporal dynamics of the human brain structures in both normal and clinical populations. This discipline emerged about twenty years ago and has made substantial progress in the past decade. The main goals of this book are to provide an overview of various mathematical, statistical and computational methodologies used in the field to a wide range of researchers and students, and to address important yet technically challenging topics in further detail.

Contemporary research in the field of robotics attempts to harness the versatility and sustainability of living organisms. By exploiting those natural principles, scientists hope to render a renewable, adaptable, and robust class of technology that can facilitate self-repairing, social, and moral—even conscious—machines. This is the realm of robotics that scientists call "the living machine". Living Machines can be divided into two entities-biomimetic systems, those that harness the principles discovered in nature and embody them in new artifacts, and biohybrid systems, which couple biological entities with synthetic ones. Living Machines: A handbook of research in biomimetic and biohybrid systems surveys this flourishing area of research. It captures the current state of play and points to the opportunities ahead, addressing such fields as self-organization and co-operativity, biologically-inspired active materials, self-assembly and self-repair, learning, memory, control architectures and self-regulation, locomotion in air, on land or in water, perception, cognition, control, and communication. In all of these areas, the potential of biomimetics is shown through the construction of a wide range of different biomimetic devices and animal-like robots. Biohybrid systems is a relatively new field, with exciting and largely unknown potential, but one that is likely to shape the future of humanity. Chapters outline current research in areas including brain-machine interfaces-where neurons are connected to microscopic sensors and actuators-and various forms of intelligent prostheses from sensory devices like artificial retinas, to life-like artificial limbs, brain implants, and virtual reality-based rehabilitation approaches. The handbook concludes by exploring the impact living machine technology will have on both society and the individual, by forcing human beings to question how we see and understand ourselves. With contributions from leading researchers drawing on ideas from science, engineering, and the humanities, this handbook will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students of biomimetic and biohybrid technologies. Researchers in the areas of computational modeling and engineering, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, artificial life, biorobotics, neurorobotics, and human-machine interfaces, will find Living Machines an invaluable resource.

The visual world of animals is highly diverse and often very different from that of humans. This book provides an extensive review of the latest behavioral and neurobiological research on animal vision, detailing fascinating species similarities and differences in visual processing.

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioural expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?

Communication is increasingly moving beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to ‘ways of feeling’. This Open Access book provides social design insights and implications for HCI research and design exploring digitally mediated touch communication. It offers a socially orientated map to help navigate the complex social landscape of digitally mediated touch for communication: from everyday touch-screens, tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, to the tactile internet of skin. Drawing on literature reviews, new case-study vignettes, and exemplars of digital touch, the book examines the major social debates provoked by digital touch, and investigates social themes central to the communicative potential and societal consequences of digital touch: · Communication environments, capacities and practices · Norms associations and expectations · Presence, absence and connection · Social imaginaries of digital touch · Digital touch ethics and values The book concludes with a discussion of the significance of social understanding and methods in the context of Interdisciplinary collaborations to explore touch, towards the design of digital touch communication, ‘ways of feeling’, that are useable, appropriate, ethical and socially aware.