The Parmenides Foundation launched its book series On Thinking in 2009. Editors of the series are Prof. Dr. Ernst Pöppel and Prof. Dr. Albrecht von Müller, directors of the Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking and the Parmenides Center for Art and Science. Each volume is edited by different volume editors.
The first volume Neural Correlates of Thinking is edited by Eduard Kraft, Ernst Pöppel – both Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking in Munich – and Balázs Gulyás, a neuroscientist at the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
The book aims to provide an overview of present attempts to identify neural mechanisms underlying thinking and reasoning operations. It is a concise introduction into the potential and limitations of imaging techniques to shed light on the question of how human thinking is implemented in the brain.
The second volume Towards a Theory of Thinking pursues a multidisciplinary approach and presents a diverse range of perspectives on thinking from philosophy, experimental and developmental psychology, neuro- and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, evolutionary anthropology and biology. The underlying hypothesis is that a fully-fledged multi-layer theory of thinking must be drawing on all of these disciplines, methodologies, and different levels of investigation and explanation.
Editors of the second volume are Britt Glatzeder, Vinod Goel, and Albrecht von Müller. Vinod Goel is professor of cognitive neuroscience at York University, Toronto; Britt Glatzeder and Albrecht von Müller are both doctors of philosophy at the Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking. The second volume has been released in March 2010.
The third volume Culture and Neural Frames of Cognition and Communication addresses the issue how thinking and the underlying neural mechanisms are affected by culture and identity. Cultural neuroscience combines brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and event-related brain potentials with methods of social and cultural psychology to investigate whether and how cultures influence the neural mechanisms of perception, attention, emotion, social cognition, and other human cognitive processes. The findings of cultural neuroscience studies improve our understanding of the relation between human brain function and sociocultural contexts and help to reframe the “big question” of nature versus nurture. This book is organized so that two chapters provide general views of the relation between biological evolution, cultural evolution and recent cultural neuroscience studies, while other chapters focus on several aspects of human cognition that have been shown to be strongly influenced by sociocultural factors such as self-concept representation, language processes, emotion, time perception, and decision-making.
Editors of the third volume are Shihui Han and Ernst Pöppel. Shihui Han is a professor at the Department of Psychology and the director of the Cultural and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, Peking University. Ernst Pöppel is a brain researcher, Chair of the Board of Directors at the Center for Human Sciences, and former Director of the Institute for Medical Psychology, University of Munich. He is also co-director of Parmenides Center for the Study of Thinking. The third volume has been released in January 2011.
