my mind on books

Today I attended a lecture by Dr. Paul Ekman (see also Wikipedia article) on the UC Berkeley campus. Dr. Ekman spoke about his early research showing the universality of facial expressions of emotion, then demonstrated a computer-based system for training people to recognize microexpressions (brief expressions that indicate concealed emotion), and discussed work in progress on facial expressions warning of dangerous intent.

He said “Emotions do not reveal their source,” so fear can be detected but not the reason, the target or the trigger for the emotion.

Something to look forward to next fall – a new book based on a dialog between Ekman and the Dalai Lama; I had written down the title as ‘Emotional Awareness’ but on his website the title is shown as ‘Steps Towards Emotional Balance’ (and not even at the pre-order stage on Amazon yet.)

link to video interview from 2004

“Questioning consciousness” by Nicholas Humphrey

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we “know” something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this “feeling of knowing” seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

I think he must mean “philosophical fiction“….

Link to “Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing”

The website New Brain-New World covers some of the same territory as Jeff Warren’s The ‘Head Trip’:

“New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness.”

One of the new books I want to highlight is From Neurons to Notions: Brains, Mind and Meaning (coming soon in the US, already available in the UK) by Chris Nunn, a psychiatrist and an editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

From the book description:

Anyone interested in exploring the dynamics of mind and memory, how we experience time, and how ideas seem to have a life of their own, will enjoy this highly readable and enjoyable account written by a specialist in consciousness studies. Chris Nunn builds a picture of our minds suitable for the new century, a picture that is rapidly developing in ways very different from predominant twentieth-century views. Along the way, he offers an understanding of how our minds behave during sleep, how the craze for alien abduction came about, and what our sense of beauty may be based on. Final chapters extend these ideas to cover near-death and mystical experiences, among other topics. Nunn’s account ranges over theories and research evidence of the last one hundred and fifty years, and brings us right up to date with the views of modern brain scientists.

The Author’s website has a Table of Contents and Introduction.

Nunn is also the author of De La Mettrie’s Ghost: The Story of Decisions (Macmillan, 2005) and Awareness: What It Is, What It Does (Routledge, 1995 – “Search Inside” available at Amazon).

The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell is a book I probably would not have thought to read, except that I saw it on the library’s new book shelves. “Full of fascinating facts,” as one of the back-cover blurbs states, this is a good popular survey of the science and psychology of the sense of smell. Author Rachel Herz clearly has a passionate interest in her subject that is well conveyed through her writing.
Among the things I learned:

• There is an interconnection between emotion and the sense of smell – Herz suggests that in humans the emotions evolved out of the olfactory system.
• Memories triggered by scents are not necessarily more accurate than other memories, but they tend to be more emotionally intense.
• Women are attracted to the scent of men who are most dissimilar to them in major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, enabling them to select mates that strengthen the immune systems of their offspring. This preference is altered by taking birth control pills, however, raising the possibility that women who marry while on the pill may have difficulties later when they decide to have children.
• Aroma preferences and aversions appear to be learned; no odors have been found to be universally disliked across all cultures.
• It is difficult to change the response to a scent once an initial association has been made.
• Dogs have been trained to find whale scat to aid in research on the marine mammals’ population decline.

I’ve tried the Amazon new book feed mash in Fwicki: link to the feed. It has several of the mind-related categories in Amazon’s ‘hot new releases’ section merged into one feed. The feed works just fine but a “reader” page at Fwicki had to be taken down because of some problem with the way the Amazon feed was formatted.

The FeedBlendr mash from episode 1 did not work too well when inserted right into the post, so I won’t link back to it, but FeedBlendr did make a nice webpage for the feed. I like this page because you can go back through a link at the bottom of the page and browse through many pages of books, instead of just seeing the ones that happen to come up on top.[I've changed the link to open in a new browser in case it is slow to load.]

sp!ked review of books takes a look at ‘Big Ideas: The Essential Guide to the Latest Thinking’ by James Harkin, finding it “gently withering throughout” and: “Insofar as it inserts the ideas discussed within a historical context, Harkin’s introduction is indispensable.” The review discusses happiness as an example of Harkin’s approach.

Sense-Think-Act is a wiki describing “a model of human ability based on the direct experience of our faculties” with “around 300 exercises and many pages of additional data,” including an extensive bibliography on the senses, mind and basic activities.