Overview

"While The 3-D Mind 1 started the trilogy on the lateral plane (right and left hemispheres), The Corpus and the Cortex looks at brain and sign processing from an axial, or vertical, perspective, with an emphasis on neural projections that divide and connect the neocortex and the lower emotional system. It is on this plane that the mind draws lines between right and wrong, pleasure and pain, the practical and the impractical, the lawful and the lawless. The vertical axis also generates variations in levels of attention, ranging from the full awareness of ""higher mental faculties"" to the inhibitions of hyperpolarization and the autonomic impulses of lower brain and body activity. Signs and synapse are thus constantly wrapped in the foldings of judgments, emotions, and impulses of all kinds. Chevalier shows how the attentions and inhibitions of affect and norm are best understood at the crossroads of several disciplines, including neuropsychology, semiotics, and philosophy. He delves into these linkages, with an emphasis on the reciprocal concessions between the pleasure principle and the teachings of normative language (moral, rational). These mutual allowances of sentiment and judgment go far beyond cognitive models of the mind. They also bridge the Freudian and Kantian gap between self-enjoyment and morality. Far from being constantly in struggle, The Corpus and the Cortex shows that norms and infractions are the warps and wefts of a single ""neurosemiotic"" fabric. Symbolic analyses illustrating these intriguing manifestations of brain, language, and culture range from personal anecdotes to cultural identity rhetoric, animal farm imagery, shoe fetishism, and body piercing. The 3-D Mind 2 presents these analyses against the background of theories and debates concerning concepts of identity construction, metaphor, rhetoric, simulation, consciousness, morality, and eroticism."

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What a marvelous trilogy this is - a crackerjack, up-to-date study of neuropsychology blending in with semiotic and philosophical analyses at their best. Chevalier demonstrates, with great clarity, and at times eloquence and a sense of humour, that his neuropsychological/semiotic model can help us understand science, literature, myth, history, philosophy, and religion. Brilliant analyses are found in each of the three books. Chevalier has laid out in a clear, indeed spell-binding, way in concrete form the theory Charles Peirce and future semioticians such as Thomas Sebeok and John Deely have postulated: the unity of experience through semiotic understanding. William Pencak, Department of History, Penn State University This is a highly ambitious work, which is destined to lay the foundation for a whole new branch of semiotics - neurosemiotics. Chevalier demonstrates an impressive mastery of each of the disciplines (from anthropology to philosophy by way of neuropsychology) he has brought together in The 3D Mind. The originality of this trilogy lies in the way its author uses concepts drawn from neuropsychology to frame and then dissolve debates in the humanities and social sciences over such things as representation, identity construction, moral regulation, simulation, and eroticism, to name but a few of the controversies Chevalier considers from the unique standpoint he has developed. David Howes, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University

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