my mind on books

On Deep History and the Brain by Daniel Lord Smail (U of California Press, 2007)
From the book description: “Daniel Lord Smail argues that, in the wake of the decade of the brain and the bestselling historical work of scientists like Jared Diamond, the time has come for fundamentally new ways of thinking about our past. He shows how recent work in evolution and paleohistory makes it possible to join the deep past with the recent past and abandon, once and for all, the idea of prehistory. Making an enormous literature accessible to the general reader, he lays out a bold new case for bringing neuroscience and neurobiology into the realm of history.”

UC Press book information

I’m nearly through reading Steven Pinker’s Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. So far I’ve especially enjoyed the chapter on names, which includes discussion on sense vs reference in relation to meaning, a good summary of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity (see also Wikipedia), new words. and baby names.

Pinker’s discussion of neologisms leads to a reflection on the categories of things we have words for:

‘Words tend to be reserved for whole entities (“rabbit,” not “undetached rabbit parts”), for stable qualities (“green,” not “green until 2020 and blue thereafter”), for natural kinds, for events that are terminated by a single change of state or a single goal, for artifacts with a function, and for actions with a salient cause, effect, means, or manner. And words are given to the players that have roles in the events we make assertions about, not to the assertions themselves. A sentence can be true or false, but a word cannot.

By these lights, interesting neologisms tend to fail precisely because they are interesting … because the coiner is really commenting on something rather than naming something.’ (p. 310-311)

Here are some more links related to Pinker’s discussion of names:

Project Steve from the National Center for Science Education

You can track the popularity of baby names at Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager (Java required). Below is a screenshot of names starting with “Ste,” including Stephen, Steven, Steve (and Stephanie):

A book referred to in the chapter:

A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change by Stanley Lieberson

See also this earlier post: Reading list for Steven Pinker’s ‘Stuff of Thought’

Science Daily has an article on the new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World by Dario Maestripien, while as a counterpoint Dissident Voice discusses “neuroscience and moral politics.”

Also David Chalmers announces a new online bibliography on philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness at MindPapers, with over 18000 entries! (And it appears to be very well organized too, though I haven’t had time yet to delve in there much.)

TedTalks has posted a talk by V.S. Ramachandran.

TEDBlog recently posted a list of all the TEDTalks (as of mid-Oct 07). They also have talks listed by themes; here is the theme “How the Mind Works.”

Ramachandran’s 2003 Reith Lectures

Recent book:

Forthcoming book:

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle (10/21/07) had an excerpt from Love and Language by Ilan Stavans: “The book’s central theme is how the concept of love – whether platonic, courtly, romantic, mystical or metaphysical – changes over time and from one civilization to another.”

Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, reviewed in the Globe and Mail, also has an intriguing website.

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is an entrancing taxonomy of waking, sleeping and dreaming states of consciousness. It is a book of psychology and neuroscience, and also of adventure, wherein the author not only comes to a new understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, but—perhaps mistakenly—comes to believe he possesses thrilling and unusual consciousness superpowers. The many figures, sequential panels and mechanical devices are rendered in the author’s own hand.

“Online Papers in Philosophy” is a blog that tracks, you know, online papers in philosophy, many with abstracts. The latest update (Oct. 19) includes an entry by Thomas Metzinger on “Self Models” at Scholarpedia, part of Scholarpedia’s Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience. (Metzinger is author of ‘Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity‘)

I’ll have to give up on the Amazon slideshow widget at least for now. I thought I had it figured out earlier today; it worked in Internet Explorer but I found out that it didn’t work in Firefox at all. So here is a selection of books on emotion that would have been in the slideshow… (and I apologize for any problems that occurred with the feed):

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

Three by Antonio Damasio:

• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman

Emotion and Consciousness ed. by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman

The Private Life of the Brain: Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self by Susan Greenfield

Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux

What Is an Emotion?: Classic and Contemporary Readings ed, by Robert C. Solomon

I’ve been trying to make an “Amazon Slideshow Widget” but couldn’t get it to work without breaking the WordPress theme, so for now I’ll just point out that a draft version of Marvin Minsky’s book ‘The Emotion Machine” is available from his website, found thanks to Interactive Architecture.org

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, is probably best known for Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

In the last chapter of his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, based on interviews with 91 creative individuals, Csikszentmihalyi offers some practical suggestions for enhancing creativity. These are the summary points discussed more completely in the book:

Try to be surprised by something every day.

Try to surprise at least one person every day.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others.

When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.

If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable.

To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.

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