my mind on books

The New York Times Notable Books of 2008 list is out. Here are the more “mind-related” highlights from the nonfiction list (with links to Amazon and to the New York Times review):

Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto (NYT review)

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (NYT review)

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam (NYT review)

How Fiction Works by James Wood (NYT review)

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman (NYT review)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (NYT review)

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (NYT review)

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson (NYT review)

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju (NYT review)

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (NYT review)

Here is a list of books on consciousness published in 2008 plus some of the titles coming in 2009, based on a search at WorldCat. Some things to look forward to in the coming year include new books from James (Zen and the Brain) Austin and Thomas (Being No One) Metzinger.

2008

• The Achilles of rationalist psychology ed. by Thomas M Lennon; Robert Stainton; (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2008). (publisher info)
• Biological systems of the brain: unlocking the secrets of consciousness by Charles T Ross; Shirley F Redpath (Leicester : Matador, 2008).
• Brain and dissociated mind by Petr Bob (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008).
• Consciousness from zombies to angels: the shadow and the light of knowing who you are by Christian De Quincey (Rochester, Vt. : Park Street Press, 2008) [forthcoming].
• Consciousness in Indian philosophy: the advaita doctrine of “awareness only” by Sthaneshwar Timalsina (New York: Routledge, 2008) [forthcoming].
• Disorders of consciousness (Handbook of Clinical Neurology)ed. by G Bryan Young; Eelco F.M. Wijdicks (Amsterdam ; London : Elsevier, 2008).
• Frontiers of consciousness : the Chichele lectures ed. by Lawrence Weiskrantz; Martin Davies (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008) [forthcoming].
• God and phenomenal consciousness : a novel approach to knowledge arguments by Yujin Nagasawa (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Integral drama : culture, consciousness and identity by William S Haney (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008).
• Mindreal : how the mind creates its own virtual reality by Robert E Ornstein; ill. by Ted Dewan (Boston: Malor Books, 2008)
• The neurology of consciousness: cognitive neuroscience and neuropathology by Steven Laureys; Giulio Tononi (Amsterdam; London: Academic, 2008).
• Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge : new essays on consciousness and physicalism ed. by Torin Andrew Alter; Sven Walter (New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Quantum shift in the global brain : how the new scientific reality can change us and our worldby Ervin Laszlo (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008).
• The reflexive nature of consciousness by Greg Janzen (Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2008).
• Sourcing the self : debating the relations between language and consciousness by Kathy Pitt (Oxford : Peter Lang, 2008).
• Transcending the speed of light : consciousness, quantum physics, and the fifth dimension by Marc J Seifer (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008).
• Worldly acts and sentient things: the persistence of agency from Stein to DeLillo by Robert Chodat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

2009

• Consciousness by Donald F Weaver (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) [July 2009].
• Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts by Michael Tye (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). [March 2009]
• A dialogue on consciousness by Torin Andrew Alter; Robert Howell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). [Jan 2009]
• The ego tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self by Thomas Metzinger (New York : Basic Books, 2009) [March 2009].
• Others in mind: social origins of self-consciousness by Philippe Rochat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). [Feb 2009]
• Out of our heads: why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness by Alva Noë (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009) [Feb 2009].
• Selfless insight : Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness by James H Austin (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2009) [Mar 2009].

I mentioned Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success awhile ago, but it seems worth mentioning again, now that the book has been released and there are lots of related links. The Amazon page has a short video from Gladwell introducing his book.

At Gladwell.com there is a Q&A about the book and some excerpts; also an announcement on Gladwell’s blog.

See also:

• Social Capital Blog post
• Google News search
• excerpt at The Guardian
• New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani

Usually this blog focuses on keeping up with all the new books coming out but recently I came across The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books by John W. Santrock, Ann M. Minnett, and Barbara D. Campbell (Guilford Press, 1994), which provided an opportunity to look back at some classic self-help titles.

The book is based on a US survey of 500 mental health professionals who rated over 1000 books in 32 categories. Most of the book reviews the titles by category, rating them from “strongly recommended” to “strongly not recommended.” At the end there is a list of “the twenty-five best self-help books,” those highest rated overall (linked to most current edition at Amazon):

1. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
2. Feeling Good by David Burns
3. Infants and Mothers by T. Berry Brazelton
4. What Every Baby Knows by T. Berry Brazelton
5. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock [8th ed. coauthor is Robert Needlman]
6. How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Melba Colgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams
7. To Listen to a Child by T. Berry Brazelton
8. The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce by Richard Gardner
9. The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
10. The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
11. Toddlers and Parents by T. Berry Brazelton
12. Your Perfect Right by Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons
13. Between Parent and Teenager by Haim Ginott
14. The First Three Years of Life by Burton White
15. What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles
16. Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott
17. The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
18. The New Aerobics by Kenneth Cooper
19. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
20. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
21. Children: The Challenge by Rudolph Dreikurs
22. You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen
23. The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
24. Beyond the Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
25. The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker

More recently, Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Resources in Mental Health, Revised Edition came out in 2003 with some overlap in authors, but going beyond self-help books to include autobiographies, films, online resources and support groups. It will be interesting to see if this edition has a comparable list of top books or top resources.

Beyond “information overload” … The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm by French Surrealist Annie Le Brun (Inner Traditions, 2008)

Product Description
…
What underlies the many problems of the modern world–from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual–is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.

Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.

More information, including table of contents and an excerpt, is available at the publisher’s website.

See also: review at Leonardo Reviews

“Self awareness and Obama,” a recent blog post at The Frontal Cortex, mentions the notion of “self-overhearing” (aka metacognition), citing Philip Tetlock of UC Berkeley. I looked for more information about self-overhearing, which comes from Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
Paul Monk in “Foxes, Hedgehogs, and Algorithms” discusses Tetlock’s book and traces “self-overhearing” back to Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Monk provides this quote from Tetlock as a further guide to what he means by ‘self-overhearing’ (which may not be the same idea as Bloom intended):

“Good judgment, then, is a precarious balancing act…Executing this balancing act requires cognitive skills of a high order: the capacity to monitor our own thought processes and to strike a reflective equilibrium faithful to our conceptions of the norms of intellectual fair play. We need to cultivate the art of self-overhearing, to learn how to eavesdrop on the mental conversations we have with ourselves as we struggle to strike the right balance between preserving our existing worldview and rethinking core assumptions. This is no easy art to master. If we listen carefully to ourselves, we will often not like what we hear. And we will often be tempted to laugh off the exercise as introspective navel-gazing, as an infinite regress of homunculi spying on each other…all the way down.”

I recently read Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History by Ross Hamilton (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which surprisingly turned out to have a lot to do with changing concepts of the self in Western culture, from Aristotle to postmodernism. I had some difficulty following the argument in this densely woven academic text, so it was something of a relief to find my response echoed by Terry Eagleton’s review:

“But there are times when the subject threatens to disappear under this imposing weight of learning, only to re-emerge just when one thought it had sunk without trace. Hamilton does not keep a sharp enough eye on the storyline. There is a grand narrative struggling to get out of this study, which is the mysterious tale of the disappearing substance.”

Here is a quote from Hamilton’s conclusion that sort of sums up and perhaps gives a flavor of the book:

“we can point to shifts in the value assigned to aspects of accident that demarcate a series of important attitudinal domains: The reign of substance as the enduring quality with respect to accident lasted into the eighteenth century. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a shift occurred from seeking qualitative resemblances to the exploration of differences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a second shift replaced the retrospective sense of self with anticipatory self-structuring and gave primacy to inwardly determined self-definition. A third shift, one that began in the twentieth century and is accelerating rapidly, sacrificed the claim of a substantive self. According to critics like Foucault or Virilio, this movement threatens to extinguish the self completely.” (p. 301)

After the jump there are some notes from my reading… (more…)

The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being by Daniel Haybron (Oxford University Press, 2008) is due out on Nov. 15 in the US, already available in the UK.

Product Description
The pursuit of happiness is a defining theme of the modern era. But what if people aren’t very good at it? That is the question posed by this book, the first comprehensive philosophical treatment of happiness, understood here as a psychological phenomenon. Engaging heavily with the scientific literature, Dan Haybron argues that people probably know less about their own welfare, and may be less effective at securing it, than common belief has it. This is largely because human nature is surprisingly ill-suited to the pursuit of happiness. For the happiness that counts for well-being is not a matter of what we think about our lives, but of the quality of our emotional conditions. Yet our emotional lives are remarkably difficult to grasp. Moreover, we make a variety of systematic errors in the pursuit of happiness. These considerations suggest that we should rethink traditional assumptions about the good life and the good society. For instance, the pursuit of happiness may be primarily a matter of social context rather than personal choice.
This book offers an extensive guide to philosophical thinking about happiness and well-being, correcting serious misconceptions that have beset the literature. It will be a definitive resource for philosophers, social scientists, policymakers, and other students of well-being.

See also: Author’s webpage

Usually on Saturday there is a good new video at Bloggingheads and this time it is an Eliezer Yudkowsky and Jaron Lanier “diavlog” on artificial intelligence:

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom (Doubleday Business, 2008)

Product Description
How much do we know about why we buy? What truly influences our decisions in today’s message-cluttered world? An eye-grabbing advertisement, a catchy slogan, an infectious jingle? Or do our buying decisions take place below the surface, so deep within our subconscious minds, we’re barely aware of them?

In BUYOLOGY, Lindstrom presents the astonishing findings from his groundbreaking, three-year, seven-million-dollar neuromarketing study, a cutting-edge experiment that peered inside the brains of 2,000 volunteers from all around the world as they encountered various ads, logos, commercials, brands, and products. His startling results shatter much of what we have long believed about what seduces our interest and drives us to buy. Among his finding:

Gruesome health warnings on cigarette packages not only fail to discourage smoking, they actually make smokers want to light up.

Despite government bans, subliminal advertising still surrounds us – from bars to highway billboards to supermarket shelves.

“Cool” brands, like iPods trigger our mating instincts.

Other senses – smell, touch, and sound – are so powerful, they physically arouse us when we see a product.

Sex doesn’t sell. In many cases, people in skimpy clothing and suggestive poses not only fail to persuade us to buy products – they often turn us away .

Companies routinely copy from the world of religion and create rituals – like drinking a Corona with a lime – to capture our hard-earned dollars.

Filled with entertaining inside stories about how we respond to such well-known brands as Marlboro, Nokia, Calvin Klein, Ford, and American Idol, BUYOLOGY is a fascinating and shocking journey into the mind of today’s consumer that will captivate anyone who’s been seduced – or turned off – by marketers’ relentless attempts to win our loyalty, our money, and our minds. Includes a foreword by Paco Underhill.

The author’s website has chapter summaries and more.

“Buyology Roundup” at Neuromarketing collects reactions to the book.