my mind on books

In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, author Daniel H. Pink maintains that forces of “Asia, automation, and abundance” are leading to a change from the Information Age to what he terms the “Conceptual Age,” which calls for the development of “right-brained” abilities:

Design – not just function

Story – not just argument

Symphony – not just focus

Empathy – not just logic

Play – not just seriousness

Pink includes suggestions and resources for developing each of the six skills, and I’ve enjoyed exploring many of them. Some of the books he recommends –

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting,

Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture,

How to See: A Guide to Reading Our Man-Made Environment,

The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, and

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy….

Link to Dan Pink’s blog.

Howard Gardner recently published a book with a similar theme: Five Minds for the Future – his “five minds” are disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical.

Via BrainEthics blog (via Mind Hacks) comes mention of a new book by Chris Frith –Making up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World.

More information on author Chris Frith here.

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert received the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

p224-227. Gilbert identifies three shortcomings of the imagination that prevent us from knowing what will make us happy: 1. tendency to fill in/leave out things unconsciously, 2. tendency to project the present onto the future, 3. failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen. (Things will look better because the “psychological immune system” will transform meaning.)

The best way to predict is to see how others feel after similar experiences, but “our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates” (p 232).

I hope to find a more systematic way of monitoring new & forthcoming titles, but meanwhile here are some that look interesting (found by the “poking around” method). Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (April 3, 2007)
The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht (April 10, 2007)
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (April 17, 2007)
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (March 27, 2007)
Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle (Amazon says “June 5, 2007” but it is already available)
Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, And Language by Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle (May 2007)
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J. Linden (March 31, 2007)
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (May 15, 2007)
The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines by Igor Aleksander (May 1, 2007)
The Character of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind) by David Chalmers (March 1, 2008)
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (September 11, 2007)

“I think therefore I am, I think” by Stephen Cave (3/22/07) reviews three recent books dealing with free will, but concludes “the book that really does justice to this question is yet to be written.”

Books discussed in the article: Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by John Searle

Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human by Susan Blackmore

Four Views on Free Will (Great Debates in Philosophy) (forthcoming)

[A good book on free will, not reviewed in the above article, is The Illusion of Conscious Will (Bradford Books) by Daniel Wegner.]