my mind on books

I’ve just recently started reading ‘Smart World’ by Richard Ogle and here is my first attempt at a clickable mind-map/ collage for some sources and concepts related to the book. (Clicking the image here will take you to a larger hyperlinked version.)

My practice is to read nonfiction books straight through, beginning to end – I like to immerse myself in the author’s flow of thought and argument. That is not the method recommended by Paul Edwards (from the University of Michigan School of Information) in the following article:

“How to Read: Strategies for Getting the Most out of Non-Fiction Reading” (links to a 7-page pdf)

He says: “So unless you’re stuck in prison with nothing else to do, NEVER read a non-fiction book from beginning to end.” Though I can’t agree with that, there are some good tips on reading strategies.

Theoretically related is this recent book about reading (or not reading):

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard, which has been getting a lot of attention…

Complete Review has a great page full of links related to this title.

I have two personal “action items” as a result of reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist. The first is to read Virginia Woolf for her insights into self and consciousness.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter on Virginia Woolf (p. 182):

But how do we endure? How does the self transcend the separateness of its attentive moments? How does a process become us? For Woolf, the answer was simple: the self is an illusion. This was her final view of the self. Although she began by trying to dismantle the stodgy nineteenth-century notion of consciousness, in which the self was treated like a “piece of furniture,” she ended up realizing that the self actually existed, if only as a slight of mind. Just as a novelist creates a narrative, a person creates a sense of being. The self is simply our work of art, a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole “theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen.” If it didn’t exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author.

My second action item – based on the chapter on Stravinsky – is to listen to “difficult” or unfamiliar music. I’m not sure if this applies to other art forms besides music, but I was fascinated by the account of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as “simulated madness” that the mind later learned to listen to – explained neuroscientifically by the release of dopamine in response to surprising sounds. (“New Sounds” from WNYC is a good source for contemporary new music. For “simulated madness” – maybe watching a David Lynch film like ‘Inland Empire’ provides a similar experience?)

Lehrer writes (p. 142-143): “If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth… If not for the difficulty of the avant-garde, we would worship nothing but that which we already know.”

‘Proust Was a Neuroscientist’ at Google Books

Author Jonah Lehrer blogs at the Frontal Cortex.

iResearch Reporter is a search engine that extracts text to provide a summary of search results – something interesting to play with.

Found via Pandia Search Engine News.

[I'm back from my trip & resuming (relatively) regular posting.]

‘In David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”’

quote from “Mind of a Rock” by Jim Holt, New York Times Magazine, Nov 18, 2007, on panpsychism. The article refers to the book Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?; another review is linked in this earlier blog post

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Keeping Found Things Found: The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management is a new book by William Jones, who has also recently released Personal Information Management, a collection edited with Jaime Teevan. Both titles are based on a project from the University of Washington Information School.

I’ll be traveling to the Washington DC-Silver Spring MD area this coming week for some meetings related to my day job, so posting here will be even more intermittent than usual.

I’m taking Proust Was a Neuroscientist along for some travel reading.

I’ve been enjoying playing the vocabulary game at FreeRice . It’s challenging and addictive, good exercise for the brain, plus, for every correct answer, ten grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program!

Thanks to LanguageHat and Metafilter.

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Does anybody miss the link previews? I recently turned off “Snap Shots” because they started having ads, but I liked the way the previews worked with Amazon to show a little summary & price information for books. I’m looking around for a way to get that functionality back….

Continuing an occasional ‘mind alphabet’ series….

For a conceptual overview: Free will on WikiMindMap

Selected books on free will:

A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will by Robert Kane (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2005).
An Essay on Free Will by Peter Van Inwagen (Oxford [Oxfordshire] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1983).
De La Mettrie’s Ghost: The Story of Decisions by Chris Nunn (New York : Macmillan, 2005).
Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting by Daniel Clement Dennett (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1984).
Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy)by John Martin Fischer (Malden, MA ; Oxford : Blackwell Pub., 2007).
Free Will (Blackwell Readings in Philosophy) by Robert Kane (Wiley, 2001). [readings]
Free Will: A Very Short Introduction by Thomas Pink (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2004).
Free Will and Luck by Alfred R Mele (Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006). (more…)

Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Bradford Books) is a new book from MIT Press by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel, who announces the book’s appearance on his blog, the Splintered Mind.
This sounds really interesting both in the subject matter of introspection and the way the book is put together as a collaboration between opposing viewpoints (with a third collaborator, “Melanie,” as test subject). From the book description:

Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, “Melanie,” to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book contains Melanie’s accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie’s particular reports are believable.

The publisher’s website for the book includes the transcripts and audio files of the interviews, plus the first chapter of the book.