my mind on books

I’m looking forward to reading The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, especially after reading this review in the SF Chronicle, which concludes:

Reality, in other words, may be more malleable than we’d like to think. Pain may cease to be a part of it for the hypnotized surgery patient. Thunderclaps may fade to whispers for the man in a meditative trance. The only constant is our mind, but as Warren discovers on his mental journeys, “there’s just no telling what it will get up to.”

[The review actually appeared in the Sunday 12/16/07 Chronicle.]

More on The Head Trip at Google Book Search

Though not considered “notable” by the New York Times, the following titles are my picks for the top mind books of 2007. I came up with seven, listed in roughly chronological order, so there is room for a few more nominations to make a Top Ten.

1. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (James H. Silberman Books)
(featured on the latest Brain Science Podcast)

2. I Am a Strange Loop

3. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

4. Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

5. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

6. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

7. The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness

Maybe not strictly a “mind” book but certainly another notable book of the year: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder

12/16/07 – a belated addition: Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

• review of Katherine Nelson’s Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory. at American Scientist
• review of Christine Kenneally’s The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language. also at American Scientist
• Baboon Metaphysics by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth discussed on NPR’s Fresh Air
• Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia is discussed at Historical / Present
  
• Of course, Mind Hacks has reported on the Pinker-Churchland debate over The Stuff of Thought; helping out those of us who don’t have access to Nature

American Scientist Online has published this review by George Lakoff of Ray Jackendoff‘s new book, Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure (Jean Nicod Lectures)

Link to Authors@Google: Ray Jackendoff

[tags] George Lakoff, Ray Jackendoff, review, book, linguistics [/tag]

In France they watch philosophers talk on TV – as discussed in a recent book called Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television by Tamara Chaplin (found through this blog post, see also publishers’ website)

By the end of the twentieth century, more than 3,500 programs dealing with philosophy and its practitioners—including Bachelard, Badiou, Foucault, Lyotard, and Lévy—had aired on French television. According to Tamara Chaplin, this enduring commitment to bringing the most abstract and least visual of disciplines to the French public challenges our very assumptions about the incompatibility of elite culture and mass media. Indeed, it belies the conviction that television is inevitably anti-intellectual and the quintessential archenemy of the book.

Meanwhile in the US we take the opposite approach, issuing a spate of pop-culture-related “…and philosophy” books (such as The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D’oh! of Homer), as recently discussed in Philosophy Now.