Böcker i The MIT Press-serien

Why our human brains are awesome, and how we left our cousins, the great apes, behind: a tale of neurons and calories, and cooking.

How lessons from kindergarten can help everyone develop the creative thinking skills needed to thrive in today's society.

A comprehensive and unified account of the neural computations underlying speech production, offering a theoretical framework bridging the behavioral and the neurological literatures.In this book, Frank Guenther offers a comprehensive, unified account of the neural computations underlying speech production, with an emphasis on speech motor control rather than linguistic content. Guenther focuses on the brain mechanisms responsible for commanding the musculature of the vocal tract to produce articulations that result in an acoustic signal conveying a desired string of syllables. Guenther provides neuroanatomical and neurophysiological descriptions of the primary brain structures involved in speech production, looking particularly at the cerebral cortex and its interactions with the cerebellum and basal ganglia, using basic concepts of control theory (accompanied by nontechnical explanations) to explore the computations performed by these brain regions.Guenther offers a detailed theoretical framework to account for a broad range of both behavioral and neurological data on the production of speech. He discusses such topics as the goals of the neural controller of speech; neural mechanisms involved in producing both short and long utterances; and disorders of the speech system, including apraxia of speech and stuttering. Offering a bridge between the neurological and behavioral literatures on speech production, the book will be a valuable resource for researchers in both fields.

How we can evade, protest, and sabotage today's pervasive digital surveillance by deploying more data, not less-and why we should.

An essential guide to a librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning.

The English architects Alison Smithson (1928-1993) and Peter Smithson (1923-2003) were ringleaders of the New Brutalism, active in CIAM and Team 10, and influential in English Pop Art. The Smithsons, who met as architecture students, built only a few buildings but wrote prolifically throughout their career, leaving a body of writings that consider issues in architecture and urbanism and also take up subjects that are "not quite architecture¿ (the name of a series of articles written by Alison Smithson for the Architects' Journal)¿including fashion design, graphic communication, and children's tales. In this book, M. Christine Boyer explores the Smithsons' writings¿books, articles, lectures, unpublished manuscripts, and private papers. She focuses on unpublished material, reading the letter, the scribbled note, the undelivered lecture, the scrapbook, the "magic box,¿ as words in the language of modern architectural history¿especially that of postwar England, where the Smithsons and other architects were at the center of the richest possible range of cultural encounters. Boyer is "writing around¿ the Smithsons' work by considering the cultural contexts in which they formed and wrote about their ideas.

How developments in science and technology may enable the emergence of purely digital minds-intelligent machines equal to or greater in power than the human brain.

A fascinating account, written in real time, of the unfolding of a scientific discovery: the first detection of gravitational waves.

Berwick and Chomsky draw on recent developments in linguistic theory to offer an evolutionary account of language and humans' remarkable, species-specific ability to acquire it.

How Chinese characters triumphed over the QWERTY keyboard and laid the foundation for China's information technology successes today.

An introduction to economic applications of the theory of continuous-time finance that strikes a balance between mathematical rigor and economic interpretation of financial market regularities.

A call to redefine mobility so that it is connected, heterogeneous, intelligent, and personalized, as well as sustainable, adaptable, and city-friendly.

Why urban design is larger than architecture: the foundational qualities of urban design, examples and practitionersUrban design in practice is incremental, but architects imagine it as scaled-up architecture—large, ready-to-build pop-up cities. This paradox of urban design is rarely addressed; indeed, urban design as a discipline lacks a theoretical foundation. In The Largest Art, Brent Ryan argues that urban design encompasses more than architecture, and he provides a foundational theory of urban design beyond the architectural scale. In a "declaration of independence” for urban design, Ryan describes urban design as the largest of the building arts, with qualities of its own.Ryan distinguishes urban design from its sister arts by its pluralism: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city. Ryan looks at three well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism: a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania, a Bronx housing project, and a formally and spatially diverse grouping of projects in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980: David Crane, Edmund Bacon, and Kevin Lynch. And he tells three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world.Ryan concludes his manifesto with three signal considerations urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. Cities are ceaselessly active, perpetually changing. It is the urban designer's task to make art with aesthetic qualities that can survive perpetual change.

A noted French thinker's poignant reflections, in words and photographs, on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau.On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman's meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman's own history, memory, and knowledge. The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman's photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art—Didi-Huberman confesses that he "photographed practically everything without looking”—but approach it nevertheless. Didi-Huberman tells us that his grandparents died at Auschwitz, but his account is more universal than biographical. As he walks from place to place, he observes that in German birches are birken; Birkenau designates the meadow where the birches grow. Didi-Huberman sees and photographs the "reconstructed” execution wall; the floors of the crematorium, forgotten witnesses to killing; and the birch trees, lovely but also resembling prison bars. Taking his own photographs, he thinks of the famous photographs taken in 1944 by a member of the Sonderkommando, the only photographic documentation of the camp before the Germans destroyed it, hoping to hide the evidence of their crimes. Didi-Huberman notices a "bizarre proliferation of white flowers on the exact spot of the cremation pits.” The dead are not departed.

An interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterizations can be analyzed computationally.How can we account for phenomenal unity? That is, how can we characterize and explain our experience of objects and groups of objects, bodily experiences, successions of events, and the attentional structure of consciousness as wholes? In this book, Wanja Wiese develops an interdisciplinary account of phenomenal unity, investigating how experiential wholes can be characterized and how such characterization can be analyzed conceptually as well as computationally. Wiese first addresses how the unity of consciousness can be characterized phenomenologically, discussing what it is like to experience wholes and what is the experiential contribution of phenomenal unity. Considering the associated conceptual and empirical issues, he draws connections to phenomenological accounts and research on Gestalt theory. The results show how the attentional structure of experience, the experience of temporal flow, and different types of experiential wholes contribute to our sense of phenomenal unity. Moreover, characterizing phenomenal unity in terms of the existence of a single global phenomenal state is neither necessary nor sufficient to adequately address the problem of phenomenal unity. Wiese then suggests that the concepts and ideas of predictive processing can be used to analyze phenomenal unity computationally. The result is both a conceptual framework and an interdisciplinary account: the regularity account of phenomenal unity. According to this account, experienced wholes correspond to a hierarchy of connecting regularities. The brain tracks these regularities by hierarchical prediction error minimization, which approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference.

Why our brains aren't built for media multitasking, and how we can learn to live with technology in a more balanced way.

An economist's perspective on the nuts and bolts of economic policymaking, based on his experience as the Chief Economic Adviser in India.

A book that promotes the thesis that basic forms of mentality-intentionally directed cognition and perceptual experience-are best understood as embodied yet contentless.

Perceptrons - the first systematic study of parallelism in computation - has remained a classical work on threshold automata networks for nearly two decades.

Marine Hydrodynamics was specifically designed to meet the need for an ocean hydrodynamics text that is up-to-date in terms of both content and approach. The book is solidly based on fundamentals, but it also guides the student to an understanding of their engineering applications through its consideration of realistic configurations.

How embracing untranslatable terms for well-being-from the Finnish sisu to the Yiddish mensch-can enrich our emotional understanding and experience.