my mind on books

Science Daily has an article on the new book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World by Dario Maestripien, while as a counterpoint Dissident Voice discusses “neuroscience and moral politics.”

Also David Chalmers announces a new online bibliography on philosophy of mind and the science of consciousness at MindPapers, with over 18000 entries! (And it appears to be very well organized too, though I haven’t had time yet to delve in there much.)

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle (10/21/07) had an excerpt from Love and Language by Ilan Stavans: “The book’s central theme is how the concept of love – whether platonic, courtly, romantic, mystical or metaphysical – changes over time and from one civilization to another.”

Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, reviewed in the Globe and Mail, also has an intriguing website.

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is an entrancing taxonomy of waking, sleeping and dreaming states of consciousness. It is a book of psychology and neuroscience, and also of adventure, wherein the author not only comes to a new understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, but—perhaps mistakenly—comes to believe he possesses thrilling and unusual consciousness superpowers. The many figures, sequential panels and mechanical devices are rendered in the author’s own hand.

A lot of “must read” books have been appearing recently, but I don’t want to overlook this one:

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (Bradford Books) by Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University.

MIT Press has Table of Contents + Introduction available online.

Flanagan has written on consciousness and participated in the Mind and Life Institute conferences with the Dalai Lama.

Google video from Mind & Reality Symposium

Salon has an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein (“America’s brainiest couple”!) that I’ve added to the “‘Stuff of Thought’ reading list.”

Oliver Sack’s new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is due to be released tomorrow (10/16/07).

Available now: Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (who blogs at The Frontal Cortex)

Tying the two new books together: Lehrer’s post “Sacks on Music” at the Frontal Cortex