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

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 David Chalmers’s slogan, “Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.”’

quote from “Mind of a Rock” by Jim Holt, New York Times Magazine, Nov 18, 2007, on panpsychism. The article refers to the book Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?; another review is linked in this earlier blog post

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Describing Inner Experience?: Proponent Meets Skeptic (Bradford Books) is a new book from MIT Press by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel, who announces the book’s appearance on his blog, the Splintered Mind.
This sounds really interesting both in the subject matter of introspection and the way the book is put together as a collaboration between opposing viewpoints (with a third collaborator, “Melanie,” as test subject). From the book description:

Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel recruited a subject, “Melanie,” to report on her conscious experience using Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling method (in which the subject is cued by random beeps to describe her conscious experience). The heart of the book contains Melanie’s accounts, Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel’s interviews with her, and their subsequent discussions while studying the transcripts of the interviews. In this way the authors dispute about the general reliability of introspective reporting is steadily tempered by specific debates about the extent to which Melanie’s particular reports are believable.

The publisher’s website for the book includes the transcripts and audio files of the interviews, plus the first chapter of the book.