Taking Action is not just
another informative, up-to-date, and challenging sample of cognitive neuroscientific
research on intentional acts. To be sure the book is all that, but it is also
much more. In fact, what makes this volume stand out among its peers is the
hands-on, forthright empirical approach that all its contributors take to the
study of intentional action. Here theoretical reasoning is both informed and
supported by rigorous empirical evidence. More importantly, the research
presented here takes action in all its complexity, which is to say that it
looks at it from the point of view of the interactions that take place among
perceptual, cognitive and motor processes whenever you, say, aim a dart at a
board or strike a cord in a guitar. As S. Johnson-Frey explains in his
editorial preface, traditional approaches tend to adhere to a tripartite
division of function in the brain (into perceptual, cognitive and motor) and
with it to a divide-and-conquer methodology.  This, even if not totally without
its merits, has the fundamental flaw of impeding, rather than facilitating, the
understanding of phenomena that by their very own nature straddle such
artificially defined domains. And, precisely, what the essays included in this
volume show €“ as much by example as by content €“ is that we must think across
these traditional conceptual borders if we are to fully understand intentional
acts. Particularly good illustrations of this point are the chapters by Jeannerod
(Chap. 5), who shows that brain areas previously thought to be exclusively
involved in either perception or motor control can in fact be engaged by
internal simulation of action, and Kruse et al. (Chap.  12), who argue in
detail that our ability to catch moving objects can only be understood by
taking into account complex interactions between perceptual, cognitive and
motor processes.

In terms of how the book is
structured, the thirteen essays that make up this volume are further divided
into five thematic sections. The first congregates papers under the heading of
Perception and Action, the second of Intention and Simulation, the third of
Gesture and Tool Use, the fourth of Sequencing, Coordination, and Control, and
the fifth under Learning and Movement. Together they cover almost anything you
might want to know about the neurological intricacies of intentional behavior,
including the use of tools, the acquisition of new actions, catching moving
targets, feedforward and feedback mechanisms, the flexible sequencing of
individual movements, the coordination of multiple limbs, and the control of
actions compromised by disease, with space still left to explore less
researched topics such as how the brain expresses ideas through manual gestures.
Although the reader will need some familiarity both with neurological notions
as well as recent literature in the area, the contributions here included are
on the whole accessible to a wide audience, particularly neurologists,
neuroscientists, and psychologists. Philosophers with an interest in
intentional acts also stand to gain from a careful reading of the research
presented.

© 2005 Isabel Gois

Isabel Gois is a PhD student at King’s College
London working on Consciousness. Her research interests include Philosophy of
Mind, Neuropsychology, and Mental Disorder. She has articles published on
Emotions, Computationalism, and Consciousness.     

Categories: Philosophical