Michael S. A. Graziano has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Consciousness and the Social Brain.
Consciousness and the Social Brain
Summary
What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano's theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.
©2013 Oxford University Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Rethinking Consciousness
Summary
Focusing attention can help an animal find food or flee a predator. It also may have led to consciousness. Tracing evolution over millions of years, Michael S. A. Graziano uses examples from the natural world to show how neurons first allowed animals to develop simple forms of attention: taking in messages from the environment, prioritizing them, and responding as necessary. Then some animals evolved covert attention - a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory. Graziano proposes that in order to monitor and control this specialized attention, the brain evolved a simplified model of it - a cartoonish self-description depicting an internal essence with a capacity for knowledge and experience. In other words, consciousness. In this eye-opening work, Graziano accessibly explores how this sense of an inner being led to empathy and formed us into social beings. The theory may point the way to engineers for building consciousness artificially. Graziano discusses what a future with artificial consciousness might be like, including both advantages and risks, and what AI might mean for our evolutionary future.
©2019 Michael S. A. Graziano (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
The Spaces Between Us
Summary
Each of us has a protected zone two or three feet wide, swelling around the head and narrowing toward the feet. This zone isn't fixed in size: If you're nervous, it grows; if you're relaxed, it shrinks. It also depends on your cultural upbringing. Personal space is small in Japan and large in Australia. This safety zone, called personal space, provides an invisible spatial scaffold that frames our social interactions. As Michael Graziano argues in The Spaces Between Us, it also organizes our social and emotional spacing, influences our facial expressions, and shapes our interactions with everyday objects including tools, furniture, and clothing. Even ordinary actions like walking are informed by a continuous under-the-surface calculation of threats and obstacles around the body - what Graziano calls a virtual Bubble Wrap of active neurons that fire and move us to action, even before we may be conscious of our course corrections in real time. Humans evolved a complex way of interacting with others and their environment, and The Spaces Between Us looks at how this infrastructure may have led to the first smile and to a host of other human activities, from tool use to courtship to a sense of self. The book concludes with a case study of Graziano's son, who had heartbreaking difficulties developing a functioning personal space. Written with poignant narrative clarity, the book makes the case for the interested scientific public that this system in the brain is more than a fascinating scientific topic: It's deeply personal and shapes our human nature. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2018 Oxford University Press (P)2018 Audible, Inc.