my mind on books

The Mind’s Own Physician: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama on the Healing Power of Meditation ed. by Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard Davidson (New Harbinger)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

By inviting the Dalai Lama and leading researchers in medicine, psychology, and neuroscience to join in conversation, the Mind & Life Institute set the stage for a fascinating exploration of the healing potential of the human mind. The Mind’s Own Physician presents in its entirety the thirteenth Mind and Life dialogue, a discussion addressing a range of vital questions concerning the science and clinical applications of meditation: How do meditative practices influence pain and human suffering? What role does the brain play in emotional well-being and health? To what extent can our minds actually influence physical disease? Are there important synergies here for transforming health care, and for understanding our own evolutionary limitations as a species?

Edited by world-renowned researchers Jon Kabat-Zinn and Richard J. Davidson, this book presents this remarkably dynamic interchange along with intriguing research findings that shed light on the nature of the mind, its capacity to refine itself through training, and its role in physical and emotional health.

See also: Mind & Life Institute website

Mind and the Frontal Lobes: Cognition, Behavior, and Brain Imaging, ed. by Brian Levine and Fergus Craik (Oxford University Press, USA, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

In the past 25 years, the frontal lobes have dominated human neuroscience research. Functional neuroimaging studies have revealed their importance to brain networks involved in nearly every aspect of mental and cognitive functioning. Studies of patients with focal brain lesions have expanded on early case study evidence of behavioral, emotional, and cognitive changes associated with frontal lobe brain damage. The role of frontal lobe function and dysfunction in human development (in both children and older adults), psychiatric disorders, the dementias, and other brain diseases has also received rapidly increasing attention. In this useful text, 14 leading frontal lobe researchers review and synthesize the current state of knowledge on frontal lobe function, including structural and functional brain imaging, brain network analysis, aging and dementia, traumatic brain injury, rehabilitation, attention, memory, and consciousness. The book therefore provides a state-of-the-art account of research in this exciting area, and also highlights a number of new findings by some of the world’s top researchers.

Google Books preview:

The Meaning of Disgust by Colin McGinn (Oxford University Press, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Disgust has a strong claim to be a distinctively human emotion. But what is it to be disgusting? What unifies the class of disgusting things? Colin McGinn sets out to analyze the content of disgust, arguing that life and death are implicit in its meaning. Disgust is a kind of philosophical emotion, reflecting the human attitude to the biological world. Yet it is an emotion we strive to repress. It may have initially arisen as a method of curbing voracious human desire, which itself results from our powerful imagination. Because we feel disgust towards ourselves as a species, we are placed in a fraught emotional predicament: we admire ourselves for our achievements, but we also experience revulsion at our necessary organic nature. We are subject to an affective split. Death involves the disgusting, in the shape of the rotting corpse, and our complex attitudes towards death feed into our feelings of disgust. We are beings with a “disgust consciousness”, unlike animals and gods-and we cannot shake our self-ambivalence. Existentialism and psychoanalysis sought a general theory of human emotion; this book seeks to replace them with a theory in which our primary mode of feeling centers around disgust. The Meaning of Disgust is an original study of a fascinating but neglected subject, which attempts to tell the disturbing truth about the human condition.

See also: “Disgust and Death” lecture at the Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois, 4/9/10 (links to Real Player video and mp3)

Google books preview:

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon (W.W. Norton, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 7 Feb 2012)

Product description from the publisher:

A radical new explanation of how life and consciousness emerge from physics and chemistry.
As physicists work toward completing a theory of the universe and biologists unravel the molecular complexity of life, a glaring incompleteness in this scientific vision becomes apparent. The “Theory of Everything” that appears to be emerging includes everything but us: the feelings, meanings, consciousness, and purposes that make us (and many of our animal cousins) what we are. These most immediate and incontrovertible phenomena are left unexplained by the natural sciences because they lack the physical properties—such as mass, momentum, charge, and location—that are assumed to be necessary for something to have physical consequences in the world. This is an unacceptable omission. We need a “theory of everything” that does not leave it absurd that we exist.

Incomplete Nature begins by accepting what other theories try to deny: that, although mental contents do indeed lack these material-energetic properties, they are still entirely products of physical processes and have an unprecedented kind of causal power that is unlike anything that physics and chemistry alone have so far explained. Paradoxically, it is the intrinsic incompleteness of these semiotic and teleological phenomena that is the source of their unique form of physical influence in the world. Incomplete Nature meticulously traces the emergence of this special causal capacity from simple thermodynamics to self-organizing dynamics to living and mental dynamics, and it demonstrates how specific absences (or constraints) play the critical causal role in the organization of physical processes that generate these properties.

The book’s radically challenging conclusion is that we are made of these specific absences—such stuff as dreams are made on—and that what is not immediately present can be as physically potent as that which is. It offers a figure/background shift that shows how even meanings and values can be understood as legitimate components of the physical world.

See also: Author’s webpage at UC Berkeley Anthropology Department

How To Think Like a Neandertal by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge (Oxford University Press, USA)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – Jan 2012)

Product description from the publisher:

There have been many books, movies, and even TV commercials featuring Neandertals–some serious, some comical. But what was it really like to be a Neandertal? How were their lives similar to or different from ours?

In How to Think Like a Neandertal, archaeologist Thomas Wynn and psychologist Frederick L. Coolidge team up to provide a brilliant account of the mental life of Neandertals, drawing on the most recent fossil and archaeological remains. Indeed, some Neandertal remains are not fossilized, allowing scientists to recover samples of their genes–one specimen had the gene for red hair and, more provocatively, all had a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to be related to speech. Given the differences between their faces and ours, their voices probably sounded a bit different, and the range of consonants and vowels they could generate might have been different. But they could talk, and they had a large (perhaps huge) vocabulary–words for places, routes, techniques, individuals, and emotions. Extensive archaeological remains of stone tools and living sites (and, yes, they did often live in caves) indicate that Neandertals relied on complex technical procedures and spent most of their lives in small family groups. The authors sift the evidence that Neandertals had a symbolic culture–looking at their treatment of corpses, the use of fire, and possible body coloring–and conclude that they probably did not have a sense of the supernatural. The book explores the brutal nature of their lives, especially in northwestern Europe, where men and women with spears hunted together for mammoths and wooly rhinoceroses. They were pain tolerant, very likely taciturn, and not easy to excite.

Wynn and Coolidge offer here an eye-opening portrait of Neandertals, painting a remarkable picture of these long-vanished people and providing insight, as they go along, into our own minds and culture.

See also: “The expert Neandertal mind” by Thomas Wynn & Frederick L. Coolidge, Journal of Human Evolution 46 (2004) 467–487 (pdf)