my mind on books

Why Music Moves Us by Jeanette Bicknell (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009)

Product information from the publisher:

Surely you’ve experienced it before: you’re listening to a piece of music and all of a sudden you find a lump in your throat, a tear in your eye, or a chill down your spine. Whether it’s Beethoven’s Choral Symphony or The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’, a bit of blues or a bit of baroque, music has the power to move us. It’s a language which we all speak. But why does it have this effect on us? What is going on, emotionally, physically and cognitively when listeners have strong emotional responses to music? What, if anything, do such responses mean? Can they tell us anything about ourselves? Jeanette Bicknell uses research in philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology to address these questions, ultimately showing us that the reason why some music tends to arouse powerful experiences in listeners is inseparable from the reason why any music matters at all. Musical experience is a social one, and that is fundamental to its attractions and power over us.

The author’s website has a chapter-by-chapter synopsis.

Dread: How Fear and Fantasy have Fueled Epidemics from the Black Death to the Avian Flu by Philip Alcabes (PublicAffairs, April 13, 2009) appeared shortly before the current swine flu outbreak. (& it has a Kindle edition)

Product description from the publisher:

The average individual is far more likely to die in a car accident than from a communicable disease…yet we are still much more fearful of the epidemic. Even at our most level-headed, the thought of an epidemic can inspire terror. As Philip Alcabes persuasively argues in Dread, our anxieties about epidemics are created not so much by the germ or microbe in question—or the actual risks of contagion—but by the unknown, the undesirable, and the misunderstood.

Alcabes examines epidemics through history to show how they reflect the particular social and cultural anxieties of their times. From Typhoid Mary to bioterrorism, as new outbreaks are unleashed or imagined, new fears surface, new enemies are born, and new behaviors emerge. Dread dissects the fascinating story of the imagined epidemic: the one that we think is happening, or might happen; the one that disguises moral judgments and political agendas, the one that ultimately expresses our deepest fears.

See also: article at Smithsonian.com

Author’s website added 4/29

In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond edited by Jonathan Evans and Keith Frankish (Oxford University Press, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This book explores the idea that we have two minds – one that is automatic, unconscious, and fast, the other controlled, conscious, and slow. In recent years there has been great interest in so-called dual-process theories of reasoning and rationality. According to dual process theories, there are two distinct systems underlying human reasoning – an evolutionarily old system that is associative, automatic, unconscious, parallel, and fast, and a more recent, distinctively human system that is rule-based, controlled, conscious, serial, and slow. Within the former, processes are held to be innate and to use heuristics which evolved to solve specific adaptive problems. In the latter, processes are taken to be learned, flexible, and responsive to rational norms.
Despite the attention these theories are attracting, there is still poor communication between dual-process theorists themselves, and the substantial bodies of work on dual processes in cognitive psychology and social psychology remain isolated from each other. This book brings together leading researchers on dual-processes to summarize the state of the art, highlight key issues, present different perspectives, explore implications, and provide a stimulus to further work.
It includes new ideas about the human mind both by contemporary philosophers interested in broad theoretical questions about mental architecture and by psychologists specialising in traditionally distinct and isolated fields. For all those in the cognitive sciences, this is a book that will advance dual-process theorizing, promote interdisciplinary communication, and encourage further applications of dual-process approaches.

Memory and the Computational Brain: Why Cognitive Science will Transform Neuroscience (Blackwell/Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition) by C.R. Gallistel and Adam Philip King (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)

Product Description
Memory and the Computational Brain offers a provocative argument that goes to the heart of neuroscience, proposing that the field can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory over the course of the last several decades.

* A provocative argument that impacts across the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience, suggesting new perspectives on learning mechanisms in the brain
* Proposes that the field of neuroscience can and should benefit from the recent advances of cognitive science and the development of information theory
* Suggests that the architecture of the brain is structured precisely for learning and for memory, and integrates the concept of an addressable read/write memory mechanism into the foundations of neuroscience
* Based on lectures in the prestigious Blackwell-Maryland Lectures in Language and Cognition, and now significantly reworked and expanded to make it ideal for students and faculty

Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (Penguin, 2009) also has a Kindle edition.

Product Description from the publisher:

Winifred Gallagher revolutionizes our understanding of attention and the creation of the interested life

In Rapt, acclaimed behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher makes the radical argument that the quality of your life largely depends on what you choose to pay attention to and how you choose to do it. Gallagher grapples with provocative questions—Can we train our focus? What’s different about the way creative people pay attention? Why do we often zero in on the wrong factors when making big decisions, like where to move?—driving us to reconsider what we think we know about attention.

Gallagher looks beyond sound bites on our proliferating BlackBerries and the increased incidence of ADD in children to the discoveries of neuroscience and psychology and the wisdom of home truths, profoundly altering and expanding the contemporary conversation on attention and its power. Science’s major contribution to the study of attention has been the discovery that its basic mechanism is an either/or process of selection. That we focus may be a biological necessity— research now proves we can process only a little information at a time, or about 173 billion bits over an average life—but the good news is that we have much more control over our focus than we think, which gives us a remarkable yet underappreciated capacity to influence our experience. As suggested by the expression “pay attention,” this cognitive currency is a finite resource that we must learn to spend wisely. In Rapt, Gallagher introduces us to a diverse cast of characters—artists and ranchers, birders and scientists—who have learned to do just that and whose stories are profound lessons in the art of living the interested life. No matter what your quotient of wealth, looks, brains, or fame, increasing your satisfaction means focusing more on what really interests you and less on what doesn’t. In asserting its groundbreaking thesis—the wise investment of your attention is the single most important thing you can do to improve your well-being—Rapt yields fresh insights into the nature of reality and what it means to be fully alive.

The Origin of Concepts by Susan Carey (Oxford University Press, 2009)

Product Description from the publisher:

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts, Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially.
Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of children’s cognitive development.
Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought.

Bozo Sapiens: Why to Err is Human by Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) is due out next week (4/14) according to Amazon, but was available in my local bookstore today, joining the crowd of recent books on this popular topic of human error.

Product description from the publisher:

A dazzling new work of popular science and psychology for readers who enjoyed Blink, Stumbling on Happiness, or The Black Swan.

The New York Times called the Kaplans’ look at probability in everyday life, Chances Are, “a dizzying, exhilarating ride.” Now they take readers on a new fun-house tour, exploring the burgeoning science of why humans make mistakes.

Our species, it appears, is hardwired to get things wrong in myriad different ways. Why did recipients of a loan offer accept a higher rate of interest when a pretty woman’s face was printed on the flyer? Why did one poll on immigration find the most despised aliens were ones from a group that did not exist? What made four of the air force’s best pilots fly their planes, in formation, straight into the ground? Why does giving someone power make him more likely to chew with his mouth open and pick his nose? And why is your sister going out with that biker dude?

In fact, our cognitive, logical, and romantic failures may be a fair price for our extraordinary success as a species; they are the necessary cost of our adaptability. Michael and Ellen Kaplan swoop effortlessly across neurochemistry, behavioral economics, and evolutionary biology, among other disciplines, to answer, with both clarity and wit, the questions above, and larger ones about what it means to be human.

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia by Richard E. Cytowic and David M. Eagleman (MIT Press, 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

A person with synesthesia might feel the flavor of food on her fingertips, sense the letter J as shimmering magenta or the number 5 as emerald green, hear and taste her husband’s voice as buttery golden brown. Synesthetes rarely talk about their peculiar sensory gift—believing either that everyone else senses the world exactly as they do, or that no one else does. Yet synesthesia occurs in one in twenty people, and is even more common among artists. One famous synesthete was novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who insisted as a toddler that the colors on his wooden alphabet blocks were “all wrong.” His mother understood exactly what he meant because she, too, had synesthesia. Nabokov’s son Dmitri, who recounts this tale in the afterword to this book, is also a synesthete—further illustrating how synesthesia runs in families.

In Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, pioneering researcher Richard Cytowic and distinguished neuroscientist David Eagleman explain the neuroscience and genetics behind synesthesia’s multisensory experiences. Because synesthesia contradicted existing theory, Cytowic spent twenty years persuading colleagues that it was a real—and important—brain phenomenon rather than a mere curiosity. Today scientists in fifteen countries are exploring synesthesia and how it is changing the traditional view of how the brain works.

Cytowic and Eagleman argue that perception is already multisensory, though for most of us its multiple dimensions exist beyond the reach of consciousness. Reality, they point out, is more subjective than most people realize. No mere curiosity, synesthesia is a window on the mind and brain, highlighting the amazing differences in the way people see the world.

See also: Dr. Cytowic’s website, Dr. Eagleman’s website

Eagleman is also the author of a recent fictional work: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (which has a Kindle edition).

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding is a new book by anthropologist/primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Belknap Press, 2009).

Product description from the publisher:

Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution.

Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.

From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together (hint: it’s called the Showing-Off Hypothesis), Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.

An excerpt is available through the publisher’s website.