my mind on books

free kindle ebook – 'Buzz Books 2014, Fall/Winter: Exclusive Excerpts from Over 30 Top New Titles' http://t.co/HDii4jzIFC via @amazon

— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) May 13, 2014

Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

The New York Times bestselling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more.

Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally—to think, that is, like a Freak.

Levitt and Dubner offer a blueprint for an entirely new way to solve problems, whether your interest lies in minor lifehacks or major global reforms. As always, no topic is off-limits. They range from business to philanthropy to sports to politics, all with the goal of retraining your brain. Along the way, you’ll learn the secrets of a Japanese hot-dog-eating champion, the reason an Australian doctor swallowed a batch of dangerous bacteria, and why Nigerian e-mail scammers make a point of saying they’re from Nigeria.

Some of the steps toward thinking like a Freak:

• First, put away your moral compass—because it’s hard to see a problem clearly if you’ve already decided what to do about it.
• Learn to say “I don’t know”—for until you can admit what you don’t yet know, it’s virtually impossible to learn what you need to.
• Think like a child—because you’ll come up with better ideas and ask better questions.
• Take a master class in incentives—because for better or worse, incentives rule our world.
• Learn to persuade people who don’t want to be persuaded—because being right is rarely enough to carry the day.
• Learn to appreciate the upside of quitting—because you can’t solve tomorrow’s problem if you aren’t willing to abandon today’s dud.

Levitt and Dubner plainly see the world like no one else. Now you can too. Never before have such iconoclastic thinkers been so revealing—and so much fun to read.

See also: Freakonomics website

The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph by Ryan Holiday (Portfolio, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”  — Marcus Aurelius

We are stuck, stymied, frustrated. But it needn’t be this way. There is a formula for success that’s been followed by the icons of history—from John D. Rockefeller to Amelia Earhart to Ulysses S. Grant to Steve Jobs—a formula that let them turn obstacles into opportunities. Faced with impossible situations, they found the astounding triumphs we all seek.

These men and women were not exceptionally brilliant, lucky, or gifted. Their success came from timeless philosophical principles laid down by a Roman emperor who struggled to articulate a method for excellence in any and all situations.

This book reveals that formula for the first time—and shows us how we can turn our own adversity into advantage.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s website

The Predictive Brain: Consciousness, Decision and Embodied Action by Mauro Maldonato (Sussex Academic Press, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

An investigation of the working of the human mind, this book sets out to show that the brain is not only a reactive mechanism, but rather proactive, allowing people to make hypotheses, anticipate consequences, and formulate expectations. The book discusses how the evolution of motor modes of behavior, such as the ability to construct and manipulate instruments, has given rise to an “embodied logic” underpinning not only action and prediction but also gestures and syllable sequences that are the basis of human communication. This book then looks at how, if consciousness is caused by specific neuronal processes and, therefore, conscious states are causally reducible to neurobiological processes, it is also true that conscious states exist at a higher level than neuron activity. For this reason, this work argues that it is necessary to go beyond a hierarchical idea of levels of consciousness, and to refute the idea according to which the mental sphere is qualitative, subjective, and in the first person, while the physical sphere is quantitative, objective, and in the third person.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s website

Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

“Every practice is a mode of thought, already in the act. To dance: a thinking in movement. To paint: a thinking through color. To perceive in the everyday: a thinking of the world’s varied ways of affording itself.” —from Thought in the Act

Combining philosophy and aesthetics, Thought in the Act is a unique exploration of creative practice as a form of thinking. Challenging the common opposition between the conceptual and the aesthetic, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi “think through” a wide range of creative practices in the process of their making, revealing how thinking and artfulness are intimately, creatively, and inseparably intertwined. They rediscover this intertwining at the heart of everyday perception and investigate its potential for new forms of activism at the crossroads of politics and art.

Emerging from active collaborations, the book analyzes the experiential work of the architects and conceptual artists Arakawa and Gins, the improvisational choreographic techniques of William Forsythe, the recent painting practice of Bracha Ettinger, as well as autistic writers’ self-descriptions of their perceptual world and the experimental event making of the SenseLab collective. Drawing from the idiosyncratic vocabularies of each creative practice, and building on the vocabulary of process philosophy, the book reactivates rather than merely describes the artistic processes it examines. The result is a thinking-with and a writing-in-collaboration-with these processes and a demonstration of how philosophy co-composes with the act in the making. Thought in the Act enacts a collaborative mode of thinking in the act at the intersection of art, philosophy, and politics.

See also: Manning’s website, Massumi’s website