my mind on books

New reviews come out on Tuesdays at Metapsychology Online Reviews, and today’s batch includes reviews of The Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience and the Unconscious, an “attempt to synthesize psychoanalysis and neurobiology,” and The Concepts of Consciousness: Integrating an Emerging Science, which, according to the review, failed to realize the hoped-for conceptual integration, although the individual chapters are deemed worthwhile.

The Open University (UK) has a unit on ‘Introducing consciousness’ in their free online course materials.

Glasgow University’s Consciousness podcast

Here is an OpenCourseWare search engine (with 92 courses listed under the tag “cognitive”!)

“Questioning consciousness” by Nicholas Humphrey

The website New Brain-New World covers some of the same territory as Jeff Warren’s The ‘Head Trip’:

“New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness.”

One of the new books I want to highlight is From Neurons to Notions: Brains, Mind and Meaning (coming soon in the US, already available in the UK) by Chris Nunn, a psychiatrist and an editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

From the book description:

Anyone interested in exploring the dynamics of mind and memory, how we experience time, and how ideas seem to have a life of their own, will enjoy this highly readable and enjoyable account written by a specialist in consciousness studies. Chris Nunn builds a picture of our minds suitable for the new century, a picture that is rapidly developing in ways very different from predominant twentieth-century views. Along the way, he offers an understanding of how our minds behave during sleep, how the craze for alien abduction came about, and what our sense of beauty may be based on. Final chapters extend these ideas to cover near-death and mystical experiences, among other topics. Nunn’s account ranges over theories and research evidence of the last one hundred and fifty years, and brings us right up to date with the views of modern brain scientists.

The Author’s website has a Table of Contents and Introduction.

Nunn is also the author of De La Mettrie’s Ghost: The Story of Decisions (Macmillan, 2005) and Awareness: What It Is, What It Does (Routledge, 1995 – “Search Inside” available at Amazon).