my mind on books

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson is coming soon from the University of Chicago Press, with a scheduled release date of July 15 (according to Amazon.com). Johnson is co-author with George Lakoff of Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Johnson is also the author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.

For more on “embodied cognition”: (1)Embodied cognition: a field guide by Michael L. Anderson (2003, pdf) , (2) article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Also Evan Thompson, who was a co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, has recently published Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

“The main consideration that drives the entire argument of the book is the thesis that the often quirky behaviors of ordinary descriptive predicates derive, not merely from controllable human inattention or carelessness, but from a basic unwillingness of the physical universe to sit still while we frame its descriptive picture. Like a photographer dealing with a rambunctious child, we must resort to odd and roundabout strategies if we hope to capture even a glimpse of our flighty universe upon our linguistic film.” (p. 11)

Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior

I came across ‘Garcia’s Heart’ while browsing & thought of a few other examples of “neurofiction,” so here is the start of a list. I’m sure there are many more…

• Garcia’s Heart: A Novel by Liam Durcan (neurologist at a war crimes trial)
• The Echo Maker: A Novel by Richard Powers (Capgras syndrome)
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (“conceptual shark” attack)
• Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) by Dan Lloyd (consciousness theory plus murder mystery)
• Memories of Amnesia by Lawrence Shainberg (brain damage, brain surgery)

12/5/07 – Another to add to the list: Saturday by Ian McEwan (recommended in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing by James Elkins

Vision, I have argued, is not the simple thing it is imagined to be. It has to do with desire and possessiveness more than mechanical navigation, and it entangles us in a skein of changing relations with objects and people. In particular, vision helps us to know what we are like: we watch versions of ourselves in people and objects, and by attending to them we adjust our sense of what we are. Because we cannot see what we do not understand or use or identify with, we see very little of the world — only the small pieces that are useful and harmless. Each act of vision mingles seeing with not seeing, so that vision can become less a way of gathering information than avoiding it. (p. 201)

(on two kinds of seeing – illuminating, shedding light vs. reflecting)

According to the first model, thought takes place in darkness. Ideas and things and selves must be in a primordial darkness until thought sends out its beams to reveal them. But if I reflect on something, then I exist along with various objects in the world, all bathed in a light that comes from somewhere else. In the first model, blindness is all around; it is the condition of the world, and a thought is like a flashlight that temporarily reveals some local object. In the second there is no place for blindness, except in my own mind. If I fail to reflect, if I decline to try to understand the world, then I become blind, or rather I give way to the blindness that is within me. The second model, where the world is bright and suffused with thought, really has no place for catastrophic, ongoing blindness….
In the first model, where the world is dark and only thought can illuminate it, blindness is more permanent, and I may not be able to recover from it at all. That kind of blindness would include ingrained prejudices, permanent gaps in my thought, failures of imagination, psychotic breaks, fanaticisms and dogmas, and in visual terms, all the things I cannot see or that I refuse to see. Blindness would be all around. Every image would be a light in the darkness, and seeing or thinking would take place against a backdrop of blindness. In this way of setting the problem, blindness is the precondition and constant accompaniment of vision. It cannot be fully seen, but it must always be present wherever there is seeing. (p. 225, in hardcover edition)

author’s home page: http://www.jameselkins.com/

The “mind” and “self” were formerly the domain of philosophers and priests. Today, it’s neurologists who, armed with giant magnets, are
asking the big questions, like “How does the brain make me?” We stare into the mirror with Dr. Julian Keenan, reflect on the illusion of
self-hood with British neurologist Paul Broks, contemplate the evolution of consciousness with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran. Also, the story
of [a] woman who one day woke up as a completely different person.

Steven Johnson, author of ‘Mind Wide Open,’ is also interviewed.

Listen to the archived program: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/06/24

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