my mind on books

The Doodle Revolution: Unlock the Power to Think Differently by Sunni Brown (Portfolio/Penguin, 2014)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

There is NO SUCH THING as a mindless doodle

What did Einstein, JFK, Edison, Marie Curie, and Henry Ford have in common? They were all inveterate doodlers. These powerhouse minds knew instinctively that doodling is deep thinking in disguise—a simple, accessible, and dynamite tool for innovating and solving even the stickiest problems.

Sunni Brown’s mission is to bring the power of the Doodle to the rest of us. She leads the Revolution defying all those parents, teachers, and bosses who say Stop doodling! Get serious! Grow up! She overturns misinformation about doodling, demystifies visual thinking, and shows us the power of applying our innate visual literacy.

Doodling has led to countless breakthroughs in science, technology, medicine, architecture, literature, and art. And as Brown proves in this inspiring, empowering book, it can help all of us think and do better in whatever fields we pursue.

With passion and wit, Brown guides you from the basic Doodle all the way to the formidable “Infodoodle”—the tight integration of words, numbers, images, and shapes that craft and display higher-level thinking.

She’ll teach you how to doodle any object, concept, or system imaginable.

She’ll show you how to shift habitual thinking patterns to get cognitive breakthroughs.

She’ll help you transform boring text into displays that can engage any audience.

And she’ll give you the courage to take up your pen, pencil, or whiteboard marker, without shame, judgment, or apology.

As Brown writes in the Doodle Revolutionary’s Manifesto, “No longer will the Doodle live in a house of ill repute. No longer will simple visual language be underestimated, underused, and misunderstood. Forevermore, we acknowledge the Doodle as a tool for immersive learning and we wield its power deliberately and without restriction, in any learning environment we see fit.”

Doodlers of the world, unite! The power of the pen awaits you.

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See also: Author’s website

The Psychology of Yoga: Integrating Eastern and Western Approaches for Understanding the Mind by Georg Feuerstein (Shambhala, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

How the mind works according to the ancient yogic traditions, compared and contrasted to the approaches of Western psychology—by one of the greatest yoga scholars of our time.

Georg Feuerstein begins the book by establishing the historical context of modern Western psychology and its gradual encounter with Indian thought, then follows this introduction with twenty-three chapters, each of which presents a topic–generally a point of correspondence or distinction–between Western and Eastern paradigms. These are grouped into three general sections: Foundations, Mind and Beyond, and Mind In Transition. The book concludes with a brief epilogue as well as three appendices, adding depth to the discussion of the ancient yoga traditions as well as an informative survey of yoga psychology literature. The Psychology of Yoga is a feast of wisdom and lore, assembled from a perspective possible only for one whose monumental scholarship has been tempered and leavened by practice.

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See also: Author’s website

“An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January 2014”:

Andrew’s Brain: A Novel by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

This brilliant new novel by an American master, the author of Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, Billy Bathgate, and The March, takes us on a radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been the inadvertent agent of disaster.

Speaking from an unknown place and to an unknown interlocutor, Andrew is thinking, Andrew is talking, Andrew is telling the story of his life, his loves, and the tragedies that have led him to this place and point in time. And as he confesses, peeling back the layers of his strange story, we are led to question what we know about truth and memory, brain and mind, personality and fate, about one another and ourselves. Written with psychological depth and great lyrical precision, this suspenseful and groundbreaking novel delivers a voice for our times—funny, probing, skeptical, mischievous, profound. Andrew’s Brain is a surprising turn and a singular achievement in the canon of a writer whose prose has the power to create its own landscape, and whose great topic, in the words of Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American possibility, in which plain lives take on the cadences of history.”

The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark by Mark Turner (Oxford University Press, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

What makes human beings so innovative, so adept at rapid, creative thinking? Where do new ideas come from, and once we have them, how can we carry them mentally into new situations? What allows our thinking to range easily over time, space, causation, and agency-so easily that we take this truly remarkable ability for granted?
In The Origin of Ideas, Mark Turner offers a provocative new theory to answer these and many other questions. While other species do what we cannot-fly, run amazingly fast, see in the dark-only human beings can innovate so rapidly and widely. Turner argues that this distinctively human spark was an evolutionary advance that developed from a particular kind of mental operation, which he calls “blending”: our ability to take two or more ideas and create a new idea in the “blend.” Turner begins by looking at the “lionman,” a 32,000-year-old ivory figurine, one of the earliest examples of blending. Here, the concepts “lion” and “man” are merged into a new figure, the “lionman.” Turner argues that at some stage during the Paleolithic Age, humans reached a tipping point. Before that, we were a bunch of large, unimaginative mammals. After that, we were poised to take over the world. Once biological evolution hit upon making brains that could do advanced blending, we possessed the capacity to invent and maintain culture. Cultural innovation could then progress by leaps and bounds over biological evolution itself, leading to the highest forms of human cognition and creativity.
For anyone interested in how and why our minds work the way they do, The Origin of Ideas offers a wealth of original insights-and is itself a brilliant example of the innovative thinking it describes.

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See also: Author’s website

My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel (Knopf, 2014)

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

Book description from the publisher:

A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition

As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.
My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

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