COMPUTER

Produktbeschreibung

Kurzbeschreibung

If the conscious mind?the part you consider to be you?is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing?
 
In this sparkling and provocative new book, the renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries: Why can your foot move halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do you hear your name being mentioned in a conversation that you didn?t think you were listening to? What do Ulysses and the credit crunch have in common? Why did Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant in 1916? Why are people whose names begin with J more likely to marry other people whose names begin with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? And how is it possible to get angry at yourself?who, exactly, is mad at whom?
 
Taking in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, beauty, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence, and visual illusions, Incognito is a thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions.

From the Hardcover edition.

Kurzbeschreibung

If the conscious mind?the part you consider to be you?is just the tip of the iceberg, what is the rest doing?
 
In this sparkling and provocative new book, the renowned neuroscientist David Eagleman navigates the depths of the subconscious brain to illuminate surprising mysteries: Why can your foot move halfway to the brake pedal before you become consciously aware of danger ahead? Why do you hear your name being mentioned in a conversation that you didn?t think you were listening to? What do Ulysses and the credit crunch have in common? Why did Thomas Edison electrocute an elephant in 1916? Why are people whose names begin with J more likely to marry other people whose names begin with J? Why is it so difficult to keep a secret? And how is it possible to get angry at yourself?who, exactly, is mad at whom?
 
Taking in brain damage, plane spotting, dating, drugs, beauty, infidelity, synesthesia, criminal law, artificial intelligence, and visual illusions, Incognito is a thrilling subsurface exploration of the mind and all its contradictions.

From the Hardcover edition.

Amazon.com

As human rights activist Rainer Hildebrandt observed in 1948, communist East Germany resembled nothing so much as a vast "concentration camp in which only the warders and those who hand out the food can still live well." Those warders were known collectively as the Ministerium für Statessicherheit, or Stasi. As John Koehler suggests in the impressively detailed Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police, their history is the history of totalitarian East Germany. Including informants, the Stasi at one point would number one operative for every 66 East German citizens; so ruthless and efficient were they in their efforts to squelch dissent that even the KGB found itself occasionally appalled by the Stasi's methods.

Right up to its 1990 demise, the Stasi cast a huge net of spies and agents around Europe and the rest of the world, enlisting as many as 30,000 West Germans as secret operatives, and involving more than a few American intelligence personnel in traitorous dalliances that would badly damage NATO defense capabilities during the Cold War. Koehler, a longtime foreign correspondent with Associated Press and onetime aide to president Ronald Reagan, based much of his research on the vast archive of secret Stasi documents discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent unification of Germany. Although this book is only the tip of the iceberg, he has provided a fascinating look into the inner workings of one of the most dangerous, but least known, organizations of the 20th century. --Tjames Madison

(After the collapse of the Berlin Wall and unification of Germany, journalist Timothy Garton Ash gained access to his Stasi file and began interviewing the people who contributed to it. The results of his investigation are found in the compelling The File.)