Chevalier (anthropology, Carlton U., Ottawa) begins a series of three non-technical volumes on connections between brain, sign, and mind, seeking answers at the intersection between neuropsychology, semiotics, and philosophy. Here he explores symbols ranging from western naming practices to botanical imageries appearing in Genesis, English poetry, and native Mexican mythology.Distributed in the US by CUP Services. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

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.

This is the coronal plane that governs the weavings of remembrance and anticipation, recollections of the past and expectations of the future. Chevalier shows that while brain and sign processing caters to events that succeed in attracting our attention, it also provides means to produce silence where unawareness is called for. Some inattention to things that are no longer or not yet is a requirement of the plotting of signs of hope and apprehension folding and unfolding in narrative time. The end result is a complex calculus of recollection, anticipation, and hope combined with traces of deferment, forgetfulness, and fear. This intricate "time-machine" built into language and the brain governs the "working memory system, an active memory operating by necessity in the present tense. Chevalier explores these issues in light of what philosophers such as St. Augustine, Kant, Heidegger, and Lévi-Strauss have said about memory and the nature of time. Arguing against all static and apocalyptic conceptions of time, Chevalier applies his own blending of "neurosemiotics" and Ricoeurian hermeneutics to the interpretive analysis of narrative plots ranging from a cat drawn by a child to intriguing speculations on the hot and the cold in Mexican Nahua agriculture. The 3-D Mind 3 also looks at prophecies of demonic scorpions in the Book of Revelation, and signs of the End heralded by the tragedy of Ground Zero.