my mind on books

Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre by Keith Johnstone (Routledge, 1987)

Though I’d much rather sit in the back row than stand up in front of people doing anything, I was hooked into Impro by Keith Johnstone after reading the first page, which starts out:

As I grew up, everything started getting grey and dull. I could still remember the amazing intensity of the world I’d lived in as a child, but I thought the dulling of perception was an inevitable consequence of age—just as the lens of the eye is bound gradually to dim. I didn’t understand that clarity is in the mind.
I’ve since found tricks that can make the world blaze up again in about fifteen seconds, and the effects last for hours.

[...which he then goes on to tell about!]

A little later, though still on the first page, Johnstone talks about “attending” to images: “I learned to ‘hold the mind still’ like a hunter waiting in a forest” and (now on page two) “After a lot of practice at attending to the images I conjured up, I belatedly thought of attending to the reality around me. Then the deadness and greyness immediately sloughed off…”

A Dialogue on Consciousness by Torin Alter and Robert J. Howell (Oxford University Press, 2009) is expected to be available on Jan. 13, 2009.

Product Description
In recent years, the problem of consciousness has developed into one of the most important and hotly contested areas in the philosophy of mind. Many philosophers regard consciousness as an entirely physical phenomenon, yet it seems to elude scientific explanation. On the other hand, viewing consciousness as a nonphysical phenomenon brings up even larger issues. If consciousness is not physical, how can it be explained?
Concise, up-to-date, and engaging, A Dialogue on Consciousness explores these issues in depth. It features two main characters, Tollens and Ponens–unemployed graduate students who secretly live in a university library–who bring the debate alive. Tollens and Ponens examine the most significant theories and arguments in the field, quoting key passages from both classic and contemporary texts. Their discussion encompasses an expansive and diverse range of ideas, from those that originated in the Enlightenment up to today’s most current perspectives. The dialogue concludes with a consideration of the pros and cons of modern physicalist views and nonphysicalist alternatives. An extensive annotated list of suggested readings directs readers to the most relevant and helpful primary sources.
An accessible and entertaining introduction to this complex issue, Dialogue on Consciousness ideal for courses in philosophy of mind and consciousness. It also serves as an excellent supplement to introductory philosophy courses.

For any SF Bay Area readers:
The Eighth International Conference on Neuroesthetics is coming up in a few weeks, an all-day event on Sat. Jan 17, 2009, at UC Berkeley, with mirror neurons as this year’s topic. The conference is free; just fill out a brief registration form at the website.

One of the scheduled speakers is Marco Iacoboni, author of Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. Prof. Semir Zeki from London is one of the organizers and introducers.

Steven Rose reviews four books in today’s Guardian (27 Dec 2008):

• Splendours and Miseries of the Brain: Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness by Semir Zeki (coming soon in the US, available in the UK) [Amazon has "Search Inside", so an excerpt is available]



• The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J Linden,



• The Evolution of Morality by Richard Joyce,




and

• Damasio’s Error and Descartes’ Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology by Andrew Gluck.

Rose (author of The 21st Century Brain: Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind) reminds us that “it is not brains that have concepts or acquire knowledge. It is people, using their brains” and concludes:

If humans do have an evolved sense of morality, or indeed of beauty or romantic love, the evidence shows that in practice our standards are remarkably flexible. Under these circumstances, to seek for their neurobiological correlates may be on a par with hunting the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. With the difference that the gold could at least be put to practical use.

Jason Pomerantz shares his review of My Stroke of Insight below. (See also: more of Jason’s reviews)

[If anyone else would like to chime in, please get in touch using the contact form in the sidebar. Reviews or other thoughts are welcome: What are you reading now? What was your favorite book in 2008? Do you have a "top 10 list"?]

It’s hard to give a book a bad review when the person who wrote it is so obviously deserving of sympathy and admiration. Unfortunately, I have no choice with My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor.

After years of training and working as a brain researcher, Ms. Taylor suffered a major stroke. Enough of her brain remained functional during the event that she was able to consciously decide to study what was happening to her, from the inside. After surgery and eight years of effort she managed to make a full recovery and fulfill her determination to tell her story.

When I learned of this book, I was fascinated. I was looking forward to reading a scientific discussion of the mind/body problem – the nature of consciousness and its relationship to the physical matter of our brain – from a unique perspective.

Ms. Taylor did deliver some of that, particularly at the start. She very effectively describes what she felt and experienced as various parts of her brain shut down. Those sections are fascinating.

Unfortunately, far more of the book is dominated by a New Age haze. It’s filled with discussions of positive and negative energy and our connectedness with the universe. It preaches endlessly that, if only we would all listen to the trillions of molecular geniuses that make up our bodies there would be world harmony and we’d spend our time hugging each other. Something like that, anyway. My mind sort of drifted.

The stroke that afflicted Taylor disabled the left side of her brain. As anyone with even a passing familiarity to neuroscience has heard explained a thousand times each side of our brains serve very different functions. The left more-or-less controls our linguistic and analytical selves, the right our intuitive and holistic. In an ordinarily functioning brain the two hemispheres are connected by a thick bunch of neurons called the ‘corpus callosum’, so much so that we perceive ourselves as one unitary being.

When her left side went out, Taylor’s consciousness became completely dominated by her right brain. She no longer thought in words and she lost the distinction between her body and the rest of the universe. Further, according to Taylor, the left brain controls our ability to weave individual moments of perception together into coherent narratives. Without it, she felt herself completely living in individual moments of time, focused intensely on the now.

If all of that sounds familiar, it’s because what one person calls symptoms, another calls Nirvana. Through a freak medical event Taylor achieved, almost instantly, exactly what mystics and meditators spend lifetimes seeking.

Taylor does a good job conveying her own ambiguity at the experience. She quickly grasps the value of her new state of being: A joy at her sense of oneness with the universe. But she also understands the tragedy of the loss of her rational self, particularly her inability to communicate with others.

It’s an inherently gripping story and parts held me rapt. But then, somewhere around the middle of the book, Taylor takes off the lab coat of a scientist and puts on the robes of a yogi. We hear far less about neurons and MRI’s and cognitive systems and far more about peace, love and understanding and universal compassion and we are all made of star stuff. All noble sentiments, but also very, very dull.

Taylor clearly touched something and she desperately wants us all to share the positive aspects of her experience. But the fuzzy, crunchy granola tendencies of her writing make it all lost in a hippy-dippy fog.

Another odd problem is that, for a brain scientist, Taylor exhibits a bizarre amount of mind/body confusion: She is constantly listening to her brain, and talking to her brain, and ordering her brain around. It all begs the question, what exactly is doing the listening and the talking and the ordering? My left side would like to suggest that it would have been far more clear for her to write that one part of her brain was listening to, talking to and ordering around other parts. But, I suppose, that would have lessened the right brain poetry.

My Stoke of Insight is the rare book that manages to be scientific and New Age at the same time. I’m only sorry there wasn’t more science and less New Age.

On a related note…

For a more consistently interesting discussion of the problem of multiple minds struggling with each other in our brains, read First Person Plural, by Paul Bloom, published in The Atlantic. (Bloom can also be seen in a fascinating Blogging Heads Diavlog with Will Wilkinson.)

[Reprinted with permission from http://www.fiddleandburn.com/me/#6]

Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind by Daniel Tammet (Free Press, 2009).

Tammet’s previous book is Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.

Here is the product description for Embracing the Wide Sky:

Owner of “the most remarkable mind on the planet,” (according to Entertainment Weekly) Daniel Tammet captivated readers and won worldwide critical acclaim with the 2007 New York Times bestselling memoir, Born On A Blue Day, and its vivid depiction of a life with autistic savant syndrome. In his fascinating new book, he writes with characteristic clarity and personal awareness as he sheds light on the mysteries of savants’ incredible mental abilities, and our own.

Tammet explains that the differences between savant and non-savant minds have been exaggerated; his astonishing capacities in memory, math and language are neither due to a cerebral supercomputer nor any genetic quirk, but are rather the results of a highly rich and complex associative form of thinking and imagination. Autistic thought, he argues, is an extreme variation of a kind that we all do, from daydreaming to the use of puns and metaphors.

Embracing the Wide Sky combines meticulous scientific research with Tammet’s detailed descriptions of how his mind works to demonstrate the immense potential within us all. He explains how our natural intuitions can help us to learn a foreign language, why his memories are like symphonies, and what numbers and giraffes have in common. We also discover why there is more to intelligence than IQ, how optical illusions fool our brains, and why too much information can make you dumb.

Many readers will be particularly intrigued by Tammet’s original ideas concerning the genesis of genius and exceptional creativity. He illustrates his arguments with examples as diverse as the private languages of twins, the compositions of poets with autism, and the breakthroughs, and breakdowns, of some of history’s greatest minds. Embracing the Wide Sky is a unique and brilliantly imaginative portrait of how we think, learn, remember and create, brimming with personal insights and anecdotes, and explanations of the most up-to-date, mind-bending discoveries from fields ranging from neuroscience to psychology and linguistics. This is a profound and provocative book that will transform our understanding and respect for every kind of mind.

Tammet’s blog has book excerpts and links to a great video for the book that I’m embedding here:

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton (Bloomsbury, 2008) is due out on Dec. 23, maybe just in time for Christmas if your local bookstore has it, or perhaps something to keep in mind if you have gift certificates to use after the holidays.

Here is the product description:

In a groundbreaking new book that does for art what Stephen Pinker’s The Language Instinct did for linguistics, Denis Dutton overturns a century of art theory and criticism and revolutionizes our understanding of the arts.
The Art Instinct combines two fascinating and contentious disciplines—art and evolutionary science—in a provocative new work that will change forever the way we think about the arts, from painting to literature to movies to pottery. Human tastes in the arts, Dutton argues, are evolutionary traits, shaped by Darwinian selection. They are not, as the past century of art criticism and academic theory would have it, just “socially constructed.”
Our love of beauty is inborn, and many aesthetic tastes are shared across remote cultures—just one example is the widespread preference for landscapes with water and distant trees, like the savannas where we evolved. Using forceful logic and hard evidence, Dutton shows that we must premise art criticism on an understanding of evolution, not on abstract “theory.” He restores the place of beauty, pleasure, and skill as artistic values.
Sure to provoke discussion in scientific circles and uproar in the art world, The Art Instinct offers radical new insights into both the nature of art and the workings of the human mind.

The book has a website, though not a lot is there yet. See also: author’s website. According to Wikipedia, Dutton is a co-founder of the website Arts & Letters Daily Review, which I have often visited and enjoyed.

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009) is due out on Jan. 12.

Product Description

A new examination of the surprising origins of human goodness. In Born to Be Good, Dacher Keltner demonstrates that humans are not hardwired to lead lives that are “nasty, brutish, and short”—we are in fact born to be good. He investigates an old mystery of human evolution: why have we evolved positive emotions like gratitude, amusement, awe, and compassion that promote ethical action and are the fabric of cooperative societies?

By combining stories of scientific discovery, personal narrative, and Eastern philosophy, Keltner illustrates his discussions with more than fifty photographs of human emotions. Born to Be Good is a profound study of how emotion is the key to living the good life and how the path to happiness goes through human emotions that connect people to one another.

Keltner is a professor in the UC Berkeley Psychology Department.

YouTube has a video of Keltner discussing Born to Be Good:

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist, The Frontal Cortex) is already a popular pre-order at Amazon, though not due out until next February.

Product Description:

From the acclaimed author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist, a fascinating look at the new science
of decision-making—and how it can help us make better choices.
Since Plato, philosophers have described the decisionmaking process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate or we “blink” and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the mind’s black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they’re discovering that this is not how the mind works. Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason—and the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, it’s best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when we’re picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to lean on which part of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think.
Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research by Daniel Kahneman, Colin Camerer, and others, as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of “deciders”—from airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players. Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

Thanks to the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program I received a copy of The Uncommon Reader: A Novella by Alan Bennett, in which the Queen of England has a chance encounter with a bookmobile that sparks her interest in reading. The book focuses on the transformative effects of reading and the rather dismayed response of the palace staff. Towards the middle of the book I was feeling rather sorry for Her Majesty, but a little plot twist at the end put her in quite a different light. This book would make a good “stocking stuffer” for bibliophiles.