my mind on books

The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd (Free Press, 2008)

from the product description:

In The Time Paradox, Drs. Zimbardo and Boyd draw on thirty years of pioneering research to reveal, for the first time, how your individual time perspective shapes your life and is shaped by the world around you. Further, they demonstrate that your and every other individual’s time zones interact to create national cultures, economics, and personal destinies.

You will discover what time zone you live in through Drs. Zimbardo and Boyd’s revolutionary tests. Ask yourself:

• Does the smell of fresh-baked cookies bring you back to your childhood?

• Do you believe that nothing will ever change in your world?

• Do you believe that the present encompasses all and the future and past are mere abstractions?

• Do you wear a watch, balance your checkbook, and make to-do lists — every day?

• Do you believe that life on earth is merely preparation for life after death?

• Do you ruminate over failed relationships?

• Are you the life of every party — always late, always laughing, and always broke?

These statements are representative of the seven most common ways people relate to time, each of which, in its extreme, creates benefits and pitfalls. The Time Paradox is a practical plan for optimizing your blend of time perspectives so you get the utmost out of every minute in your personal and professional life as well as a fascinating commentary about the power and paradoxes of time in the modern world.

No matter your time perspective, you experience these paradoxes. Only by understanding this new psychological science of time zones will you be able to overcome the mental biases that keep you too attached to the past, too focused on immediate gratification, or unhealthily obsessed with future goals. Time passes no matter what you do — it’s up to you to spend it wisely and enjoy it well. Here’s how.

Read an excerpt

In case anyone would like to contact me without leaving a public comment on the website, there is now a contact form over in the sidebar, just under the “About” page. I’d love to hear from you, if you have any suggestions or just want to say hi.

I thought this was “coming soon” but it’s already available: The Continuity of Mind (Oxford Psychology) by Michael Spivey (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Product description:

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.

In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day’s events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your ‘thoughts’) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the ‘gray areas’ in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.

Jesse Prinz, author of The Emotional Construction of Morals talks to Will Wilkinson at Bloggingheads.tv.

It takes them a few minutes to get rolling…

More on Jesse Prinz (with links to papers)

Real Materialism: and Other Essays by Galen Strawson (Oxford University Press, 2008). Amazon claims to have it in stock, while Oxford says it hasn’t been published yet. Product description:

Real Materialism draws together papers written over twenty years by Galen Strawson in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Strawson focuses on five main areas of enquiry: [1] the nature of the physical, consciousness, the “mind-body problem”, and the prospects for panpsychism; [2] the self, the subject of experience, self-consciousness, and the “narrative” self; [3] free will and moral responsibility; [4] the nature of thought and intentionality and their connection with consciousness; [5] the problem of causation with particular reference to the philosophy of David Hume.

Table of Contents from the publisher:
Introduction
1. Real Materialism
2. Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism
3. Can we know the nature of reality as it is in itself?
4. Red and ‘red’
5. Self, body, and experience
6. What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience?
7. Against narrativity
8. Episodic ethics
9. Mental ballistics: the involuntariness of spontaneity
10. Intentionality and experience: terminological preliminaries
11. Real intentionality: why intentionality entails consciousness
12. On the inevitability of freedom (from the compatibilist point of view)
13. The impossibility of moral responsibility
14. Consciousness, free will, and the unimportance of determinism
15. Free agents
16. Realism and causation
17. The contingent reality of natural necessity
18. David Hume: objects and power
19. Epistemology, semantics, ontology, and David Hume
Bibliography
Index

“Against Narrativity” is available online (probably an earlier version than the one in the book). Strawson argues against the narrative view of the self in both descriptive and normative versions based on a distinction between Diachronic and Episodic forms of self-experience. The Episodic “has little or no sense that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. Episodics are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms.”

By chance I’ve just read two novels that deal with issues of identity, coming from opposite directions:

Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel by Rivka Galchen and The Soul Thief: A Novel by Charles Baxter.

In Atmospheric Disturbances, a first novel written by a younger woman, the narrator is an older man, a psychiatrist, who believes his wife has been replaced by an impostor. In The Soul Thief, the author’s fourth novel, the narrator is a graduate student who suspects another character is stealing or trying to steal his identity.

How much change or discontinuity can the concept of identity accommodate? What if the people you know suddenly don’t recognize you? What if the past you thought was yours is told to you as someone else’s story?

Charles Baxter on “questions of identity”

‘Atmospheric Disturbances’ website

I came across this passage from A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman that offers another perspective on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (See also discussion of Carr’s article at edge’s Reality Club)

Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.

Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading — Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; me-centered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, of opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having something learned to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension — has produced illiteracy. (“Right to Remain Silent” excerpted in A Blue Fire p. 170)

Dr. Seligman’s Authentic Happiness site at Penn

books by Martin Seligman at Amazon

The Retreat of Reason: A Dilemma in the Philosophy of Life (Oxford University Press, 2005, 2008)

Product description:

One of the main original aims of philosophy was to give us guidance about how to live our lives. The ancient Greeks typically assumed that a life led in accordance with reason, a rational life, would also be the happiest or most fulfilling. Ingmar Persson’s book resumes this project, which has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. But his conclusions are very different; by exploring the irrationality of our attitudes to time, our identity, and our responsibility, Persson shows that the aim of living rationally conflicts not only with the aim of leading the most fulfilling life, but also with the moral aim of promoting the maximization and just distribution of fulfillment for all. Persson also argues that neither the aim of living rationally nor any of the fulfillment aims can be rejected as less rational than any other. We thus face a dilemma of either having to enter a retreat of reason, insulated from everyday attitudes, or making reason retreat from its aspiration to be the sole controller of our attitudes.
The Retreat of Reason explores three areas in which there is a conflict between the rational life and a life dedicated to maximization of fulfillment. Persson contends that living rationally requires us to give up, first, our temporal biases; secondly, our bias towards ourselves; and, thirdly, our responsibility to the extent that it involves the notion of desert and desert-entailing notions. But giving up these attitudes is so overwhelmingly hard that the effort to do so not only makes our own lives less fulfilling, but also obstructs our efficient pursuit of the moral aim of promoting a maximum of justly distributed fulfillment.
Ingmar Persson brings back to philosophy the ambition of offering a broad vision of the human condition. The Retreat of Reason challenges and disturbs some of our most fundamental ideas about ourselves.

The review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews begins:

This book has been long in the making and it is no exaggeration to say that it was worth the wait. The dramatis personae in Ingmar Persson’s hugely impressive work are the rationalists and the satisfactionalists. The controversy between the two camps concerns one of the profoundest questions in philosophy, viz. the question of how one ought to live. Rationalists hold that human lives should be permeated by a pursuit of philosophical truth and that life should be led in accordance with such truth. Satisfactionalists hold that life should be led in ways that make them as fulfilling as possible, in terms of pleasure and felt satisfaction. …

Naturalistic Decision Making and Macrocognition ed. by Jan Maarten Schraagen et al (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008) forthcoming

Perspectives on Cognitive Task Analysis: Historical Origins and Modern Communities of Practice by Robert R Hoffman; Laura G Militello (New York: Psychology Press, 2008) forthcoming

Social Cognition and Developmental Psychopathology ed. by Carla Sharp; Peter Fonagy; Ian M Goodyer (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Social Life and Social Knowledge: Toward a Process Account of Development (Jean Piaget Symposium Series) ed. by Ulrich Müller et al (New York: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2008) (“Search Inside” available at Amazon)

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Philosophy of the Mind) by Andy Clark (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills ed. by Nancy Frey; Douglas Fisher; (Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2008)

The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition ed. by Philip Robbins; Murat Aydede (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
forthcoming

The Kingdom of Infinite Space: An Encounter with Your Head by Raymond Tallis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) forthcoming

The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Scott Atran; Douglas L Medin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008) (“Search Inside” available at Amazon)

Visual Tools for Transforming Information Into Knowledge by David Hyerle (Thousand Oaks, CA : Corwin Press, 2008) forthcoming

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Sandra Aamodt; Sam Wang (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2008) (“Search Inside” available from Amazon)

Your Brain: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald; Peter Meyers (Sebastopol, Calif. ; [Farnham] : O’Reilly, 2008)