my mind on books

Lying (Kindle Single) by Sam Harris (Amazon Digital Services, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

As it was in Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, and Othello, so it is in life. Most forms of private vice and public evil are kindled and sustained by lies. Acts of adultery and other personal betrayals, financial fraud, government corruption—even murder and genocide—generally require an additional moral defect: a willingness to lie.

In Lying, bestselling author and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we can radically simplify our lives and improve society by merely telling the truth in situations where others often lie. He focuses on “white” lies—those lies we tell for the purpose of sparing people discomfort—for these are the lies that most often tempt us. And they tend to be the only lies that good people tell while imagining that they are being good in the process.

See also: Author’s website

Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi (BenBella Books)

(amazon.co.uk – 25 Aug)

Product description from the publisher:

The scientific consensus is that our ability to understand human speech has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. After all, there are whole portions of the brain devoted to human speech. We learn to understand speech before we can even walk, and can seamlessly absorb enormous amounts of information simply by hearing it. Surely we evolved this capability over thousands of generations.

Or did we? Portions of the human brain are also devoted to reading. Children learn to read at a very young age and can seamlessly absorb information even more quickly through reading than through hearing. We know that we didn’t evolve to read because reading is only a few thousand years old.

In “Harnessed,” cognitive scientist Mark Changizi demonstrates that human speech has been very specifically “designed” to harness the sounds of nature, sounds we’ve evolved over millions of years to readily understand. Long before humans evolved, mammals have learned to interpret the sounds of nature to understand both threats and opportunities. Our speech—regardless of language—is very clearly based on the sounds of nature.

Even more fascinating, Changizi shows that music itself is based on natural sounds. Music—seemingly one of the most human of inventions—is literally built on sounds and patterns of sound that have existed since the beginning of time.

See also: Author’s website

A new book that’s gotten a number of 5-star reviews at Amazon: Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us by David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo (Crown Archetype, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Have you ever wondered why a trumpeter of family values would suddenly turn around and cheat on his wife? Why jealousy would send an otherwise level-headed person into a violent rage? What could drive a person to blow a family fortune at the blackjack tables?

Or have you ever pondered what might make Mr. Right leave his beloved at the altar, why hypocrisy seems to be rampant, or even why, every once in awhile, even you are secretly tempted, to lie, cheat, or steal (or, conversely, help someone you never even met)?

This book answers these questions and more, and in doing so, turns the prevailing wisdom about who we are upside down. Our character, argue psychologists DeSteno and Valdesolo, isn’t a stable set of traits, but rather a shifting state that is subject to the constant push and pull of hidden mechanisms in our mind. And it’s the battle between these dueling psychological forces that determine how we act at any given point in time.

Drawing on the surprising results of the clever experiments concocted in their own laboratory, DeSteno and Valdesolo shed new scientific light on so many of the puzzling behaviors that regularly grace the headlines. For example, you’ll learn:

• Why Tiger Woods just couldn’t resist the allure of his mistresses even though he had a picture-perfect family at home. And why no one, including those who knew him best, ever saw it coming.

• Why even the shrewdest of investors can be tempted to gamble their fortunes away (and why risky financial behavior is driven by the same mechanisms that compel us to root for the underdog in sports).

• Why Eliot Spitzer, who made a career of crusading against prostitution, turned out to be one of the most famous johns of all time.

• Why Mel Gibson, a noted philanthropist and devout Catholic, has been repeatedly caught spewing racist rants, even though close friends say he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.

• And why any of us is capable of doing the same, whether we believe it or not!

A surprising look at the hidden forces driving the saint and sinner lurking in us all, Out of Character reveals why human behavior is so much more unpredictable than we ever realized.

See also: Book website & blog

These 21 books received the most clicks through my associates account at Amazon.com, which provides a pretty good approximation of a “best of 2010” list for books on the mind:

Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Art of Choosing – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Character of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind) – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Male Brain – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Mind’s Eye – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology (Bradford Books) – at amazon.com, amazon.co.uk

Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Welcome to the Jungle: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bipolar but Were Too Freaked Out to Ask – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

The 14-Minute Marcel Proust: A Very Short Guide to the Greatest Novel Ever Written – at amazon.com, kindle, amazon.co.uk

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar (Harvard University Press, 2010)

(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Why do men talk and women gossip, and which is better for you? Why is monogamy a drain on the brain? And why should you be suspicious of someone who has more than 150 friends on Facebook?

We are the product of our evolutionary history, and this history colors our everyday lives—from why we joke to the depth of our religious beliefs. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar uses groundbreaking experiments that have forever changed the way evolutionary biologists explain how the distant past underpins our current ­behavior.

We know so much more now than Darwin ever did, but the core of modern evolutionary theory lies firmly in Darwin’s elegantly simple idea: organisms behave in ways that enhance the frequency with which genes are passed on to future generations. This idea is at the heart of Dunbar’s book, which seeks to explain why humans behave as they do. Stimulating, provocative, and immensely enjoyable, his book invites you to explore the number of friends you have, whether you have your father’s brain or your mother’s, whether morning sickness might actually be good for you, why Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was a foregone conclusion, what Gaelic has to do with frankincense, and why we laugh. In the process, Dunbar examines the role of religion in human evolution, the fact that most of us have unexpectedly famous ancestors, and why men and women never seem able to see eye to eye on color.

See also: Interview at guardian.co.uk, webpage at Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Dunbar at RSA: