my mind on books

I like to browse…

Music, Language, and the Brain is due to be released tomorrow (Nov. 7) from Oxford University Press.
“In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel (Senior Fellow, The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego) challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently.”

The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science (Leonardo Books), is new from MIT Press: “In The Hidden Sense, Cretien van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music, and literature, and recent neurological research.”

Consciousness and Mental Life by Daniel N. Robinson is due out on Nov. 16.

John Horgan’s critique of Gerald Edelman

More on Edelman, from Conscious Entities…

(John Horgan’s website)

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.)

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.

“Online Papers in Philosophy” is a blog that tracks, you know, online papers in philosophy, many with abstracts. The latest update (Oct. 19) includes an entry by Thomas Metzinger on “Self Models” at Scholarpedia, part of Scholarpedia’s Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience. (Metzinger is author of ‘Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity‘)