my mind on books

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang sounds like a good layperson’s guide, due out in March, and already garnering some enthusiastic endorsements.

Neuroeconomics: A Guide to the New Science of Making Choices by Peter Politser is coming in Feb. from Oxford University Press.

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but here is a reminder that V.S. Ramachandran has a new book scheduled to be released next week: The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain.

Spotted at the bookstore: Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation by Dave Edwards. “David Edwards describes how contemporary creators achieve breakthroughs in the arts and sciences by developing their ideas in an intermediate zone of human creativity where neither art nor science is easily defined.”

The beginning of the book has a nice list of related works…..

• The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat by Martin Kemp
• Science and Art: The Red Book of `Einstein Meets Magritte’
• From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature (Writing Science)
• Art and Science (Art and… Series) by Sian Ede
• Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought by Keith J. Holyoak and Paul Thagard
• Metaphor and Analogy in the Sciences (Origins: Studies in the Sources of Scientific Creativity) ed. by Fernand Hallyn
• Metaphor in Languages for Special Purposes: The Function of Conceptual Metaphor in Written Expert Language and Expert-Lay Communication in the Domains of Economics, Medicine, and Computing by Susanne Richardt
• Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition by Everett Rogers
• Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren G. Bennis
• The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life by Richard Florida

David Edwards and Jay Cantor also have a forthcoming novel, Niche (Idea Translation Lab Series)

San Francisco Chronicle article on “Cultivating happiness” (12/28/07) discusses this new book: The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky.

The article also mentions the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and the “Half Full” project on “The Science of Raising Happy Kids,” as well as the work of Carol Dweck, which was discussed here in an earlier blog post.

The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule by Donald W. Pfaff

“Renowned neuroscientist Donald Pfaff upends our entire understanding of ethics and social contracts with an intriguing proposition: the Golden Rule is hardwired into the human brain.”

Dana Foundation book information, including Table of Contents and excerpts

Browsing in some new books today, I came upon this:

Living has no meaning (except by way of projection or fabulation), nor is it absurd (despite the spiteful reaction of disbelief); it is beyond meaning.

François Jullien, Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness (tr. Arthur Goldhammer), p. 8