my mind on books

The calendar of upcoming releases has been moved to the sidebar “pages” section – here.

Three titles to look forward to in October:

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker (Viking Adult, October 4, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 6 Oct 2011)

Product description from the publisher:

The author of The New York Times bestseller The Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence.

Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species’s existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker’s exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind’s inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True by Richard Dawkins, illustrated by Dave McKean (Free Press, October 4, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 15 Sep 2011)

Product description from the publisher:

Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene revolutionized the way we see natural selection. His blockbuster The God Delusion provoked worldwide debate. Now this master science writer has teamed up with David McKean, a master of the graphic novel, to create a new genre: the graphic science book.

The Magic of Reality

Science is our most precise and powerful tool for making sense of the world. Before we developed the scientific method, we created rich mythologies to explain the unknown. The pressing questions that primitive men and women asked are the same ones we ask as children. Who was the first person? What is the sun? The myths that address these questions are beautiful, but in every case their beauty is exceeded by the scientific truth.

With characteristic clarity and verve, Dawkins uses each chapter to answer one of these big questions. Looking first at some of the myths that arose to answer the question, he then, with the help of McKean’s marvelous full-color illustrations, dazzles us with the facts. He looks at the building blocks of matter, the first humans, the sun—explaining the life and death of stars; why there’s a night and a day—ranging from our solar system to the inner workings of our planet; what a rainbow really is—going from the rainbow in your backyard to the age of the universe; and finally, he poses a question that still baffles scientists: When did everything begin? This is a frame-by-frame look at the infinite beauty behind everyday phenomenon.

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 25, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk – 3 Nov 2011)

Product description from the publisher:

Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, is one of our most important thinkers. His ideas have had a profound and widely regarded impact on many disciplines – including economics, business, law and philosophy – and have been hugely influential on Daniel Ariely, Richard Thaler, Steven Pinker, Jonah Lehrer, and Daniel Gilbert, among many other well-known writers. But, until now, he has never brought together his many years of research and thinking in one book.

In the highly anticipated Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman introduces the “machinery of the mind.” Two systems drive the way we think and make choices: System One is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System Two is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Examining how both systems function within the mind, Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities and also the faults and biases of fast thinking, and the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and our choices. The role of optimism in opening up a new business and the importance of luck in a successful corporate strategy, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future and the psychological pitfalls of playing the stock market – each of these can only be understood by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decision making.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman shows where we can trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choice are made in both our business and personal lives – and how we can guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Kahneman will change the way you think about thinking.

Landscape of the Mind: Human Evolution and the Archaeology of Thought by John F. Hoffecker (Columbia University Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

John F. Hoffecker explores the origin and growth of the mind, drawing on information from the human fossil record, archaeology, and history. Hoffecker argues that, as an indirect result of bipedal locomotion, early humans developed a feedback relationship among their hands, brains, and tools, evolving the capacity to externalize thoughts in the form of shaped stone objects. When anatomically modern humans evolved a parallel capacity to externalize thought as symbolic language, individual brains within social groups were integrated into a neocortical internet, or super-brain, thus giving birth to the mind. Noting that archaeological traces of symbolism coincide with evidence for the ability to generate novel technology, Hoffecker contends that human creativity, as well as higher-order consciousness, is a product of the collective super-brain. Hoffecker equates the subsequent growth of the mind with human history, which began in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. As anatomically modern humans spread across the globe, adapting to a variety of climates and habitats, they redesigned themselves technologically and developed alternative realities via toolmaking, tool use, and artistic expression. Hoffecker connects the rise of civilization to a hierarchical reorganization of the super-brain, triggered by explosive population growth. According to him, subsequent history reflects the varying degrees to which rigid hierarchies of states and empires suppressed the creative powers of the mind, constraining the further accumulation of knowledge. The modern world emerged from the fragments of a collapsed empire after 1200 AD. In the final chapter, Hoffecker speculates on the possibility of artificial intelligence and a mind without biology.

See also: “Evolution of human ‘super-brain’ tied to development of bipedalism, tool-making” at EurekAlert

The Organisation of Mind by Tim Shallice and Richard P. Cooper (Oxford University Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Brain imaging has been immensely valuable in showing us how the mind works. However, many of our ideas about how the mind works come from disciplines like experimental psychology, artificial intelligence and linguistics, which in their modern form date back to the computer revolution of the 1940s, and are not strongly linked to the subdisciplines of biomedicine. Cognitive science and neuroscience thus have very separate intellectual roots, and very different styles. Unfortunately, these two areas of knowledge have not been well integrated as far as higher mental processes are concerned. So how can these two be reconciled in order to develop a full understanding of the mind and brain?

This is the focus of this landmark book from leaders in the field. Coming more than two decades after Shallice’s classic ‘From neuropsychology to mental structure’, ‘The Organisation of Mind’ establishes a strong historical, empirical, and theoretical basis for cognitive neuroscience.

The book starts by reviewing the history and intellectual roots of the field, looking at some of the researchers who guided and influenced it. The basic principles – theoretical and empirical and the inferential relation between them – are then considered with particular emphasis being placed on inferences to the organisation of the cognitive system from two empirical methodologies – neuropsychology and functional imaging. The core skeleton of the cognitive system is then analysed for the areas most critical for understanding rational thought. In the third section the components of simple cognitive acts are described, namely semantic processing, working memory, and cognitive operations. In the final section, more complex higher-level modulating processes are considered, including, supervisory processing, episodic memory, consciousness and problem-solving.

This will be a seminal publication in the brain sciences – one that all students and researchers will have to read.

The Recursive Mind: The Origins of Human Language, Thought, and Civilization by Michael C. Corballis (Princeton University Press, 2011)

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

Product description from the publisher:

The Recursive Mind challenges the commonly held notion that language is what makes us uniquely human. In this compelling book, Michael Corballis argues that what distinguishes us in the animal kingdom is our capacity for recursion: the ability to embed our thoughts within other thoughts. “I think, therefore I am,” is an example of recursive thought, because the thinker has inserted himself into his thought. Recursion enables us to conceive of our own minds and the minds of others. It also gives us the power of mental “time travel”–the ability to insert past experiences, or imagined future ones, into present consciousness.

Drawing on neuroscience, psychology, animal behavior, anthropology, and archaeology, Corballis demonstrates how these recursive structures led to the emergence of language and speech, which ultimately enabled us to share our thoughts, plan with others, and reshape our environment to better reflect our creative imaginations. He shows how the recursive mind was critical to survival in the harsh conditions of the Pleistocene epoch, and how it evolved to foster social cohesion. He traces how language itself adapted to recursive thinking, first through manual gestures, then later, with the emergence of Homo sapiens, vocally. Toolmaking and manufacture arose, and the application of recursive principles to these activities in turn led to the complexities of human civilization, the extinction of fellow large-brained hominins like the Neandertals, and our species’ supremacy over the physical world.