my mind on books

The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages (Current Studies in Linguistics) by Andrea Moro (MIT Press, 2008)

From the product description:

In The Boundaries of Babel, Andrea Moro tells the story of an encounter between two cultures: contemporary theoretical linguistics and the cognitive neurosciences. The study of language within a biological context has been ongoing for more than fifty years. The development of neuroimaging technology offers new opportunities to enrich the “biolinguistic perspective” and extend it beyond an abstract framework for inquiry. As a leading theoretical linguist in the generative tradition and also a cognitive scientist schooled in the new imaging technology, Moro is uniquely equipped to explore this.

Moro examines what he calls the “hidden” revolution in contemporary science: the discovery that the number of possible grammars is not infinite and that their number is biologically limited. This radical but little-discussed change in the way we look at language, he claims, will require us to rethink not just the fundamentals of linguistics and neurosciences but also our view of the human mind.

I’ve noticed a number of new books coming out on the subject of memory; here’s a short list:

The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science–A Memoir by Jill Price with Bart Davis (Free Press, 2008)

Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research by Sue Halpern (Harmony, 2008) author’s blog

Memory: From Mind to Molecules by Larry Squire and Eric Kandel (Roberts and Co, 2nd ed., coming in July 2008)

The Metaphysics of Memory (Philosophical Studies Series) by Sven Bernecker (Springer, 2008)
……………..

And this:

A bibliography and resource list on the interdisciplinary study of memory, updated in Nov. 2007, by John Sutton, Philosophy Dept., Macquarie University

I was thinking of linking to books by the authors mentioned by David Brooks in his New York Times column “The Neural Buddhists,” but then I found out that Neuroanthropology has already done it —in “David Brooks Bonus.”

Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind by Shaun Gallagher (Imprint Academic, 2008). According to Amazon, this book is due out on June 1.
From the publisher:

Shaun Gallagher is a philosopher of mind who has made it his business to study and meet with leading neuroscientists, including Michael Gazzaniga, Marc Jeannerod and Chris Frith.
The result is this unique introduction to the study of the mind, with topics ranging over consciousness, emotion, language, movement, free will and moral responsibility. The discussion throughout is illustrated by lengthy extracts from the author’s many interviews with his scientist colleagues on the relation between the mind and the brain.

Shaun Gallagher is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Central Florida and the University of Hertfordshire.

Shaun Gallagher at Wikipedia

How Infants Know Minds by Vasudevi Reddy (Harvard University Press, 2008)

from the product description:

Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.

But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.

The publisher’s website has more information, including a 13-page excerpt.