my mind on books

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, is probably best known for Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

In the last chapter of his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, based on interviews with 91 creative individuals, Csikszentmihalyi offers some practical suggestions for enhancing creativity. These are the summary points discussed more completely in the book:

Try to be surprised by something every day.

Try to surprise at least one person every day.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others.

When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.

If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable.

To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.

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Decision-making turns out to be a popular topic, spanning self-help, business management, cognitive psychology, and various applied fields.

Below I have selected some titles published within the last few years (2005-2007), starred a couple that looked most interesting for the general reader (or to me at least), followed by links to some other book lists. [10/8/07 – added a section for reader recommendations ]

The Book of Hard Choices: How to Make the Right Decisions at Work and Keep Your Self-Respect by James A Autry; Peter Roy (New York : Morgan Road Books, 2006). [business-oriented]

Decision Making: 5 Steps to Better Results (Harvard Business Essentials) (Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School ; London : McGraw-Hill [distributor], 2006). [business-oriented]

Decision Making & Problem Solving Strategies (Creating Success) by John Eric Adair (London ; Philadelphia : Kogan Page, 2007). [business-oriented]

Decision-making in Complex Environments ed. by Malcolm Cook; Janet M Noyes; Yvonne Masakowski (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). [technical/specialized]

Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making by Alain Berthoz; tr. Giselle Weiss (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006).

*The Era of Choice: The Ability to Choose and Its Transformation of Contemporary Life (Bradford Books) by Edward C Rosenthal (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005).

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Thanks again to Mind Hacks, this time for pointing to “A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking” by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman at Edge.org.

Last February I attended two lectures by Kahneman at UC Berkeley, on intuition and happiness, which are archived here (near the top, under Hitchcock lectures). There’s some other good stuff on that page as well, including lectures on consciousness by Christof Koch and Thomas Metzinger.

For a “book tie-in” – the classic work by Kahneman, with Amos Tversky, is Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

search results for books by Daniel Kahneman at Amazon

In honor of Priscilla Palmer’s list of personal development bloggers, which continues to grow, here is a link to Amazon’s most popular books on personal transformation. If this works like I think it will, it should change to show the top books at the time the link is clicked. Right now the most popular book is Choices and Illusions: How Did I Get Where I Am, and How Do I Get Where I Want to Be? by Eldon Taylor.

Following is the full list of personal development bloggers as of now:

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(found via Mind Hacks) PsychAntenna: “an ever-growing showcase of psychology-related websites, blogs, podcasts and journals that utilize RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to broadcast their content.”

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