my mind on books

Four interesting new books coming in August…. First in a slideshow; details below.

Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City by Mark Kingwell (Viking, August 14, 2008)

from the product description:

An exploration of urbanism, personal identity, and how the space we live in shapes us
According to philosopher and cultural critic Mark Kingwell, the transnational global city—New York and Shanghai—is the most significant machine our species has ever produced. And yet, he says, we fail again and again to understand it. How do cities shape us, and how do we shape them? That is the subject of Concrete Reveries, which investigates how we occupy city space and why place is so important to who we are.

Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality by Matthew Ratcliffe (Oxford University Press, August 15,2008)

Product Description

There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as ‘existential’ because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness.

Feelings of Being is the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines.

Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief by David S. Whitley (Prometheus Books, August 26, 2008)

from the product description:

In this fascinating discussion of ancient art and religion, Dr. David S. Whitley–one of the world’s leading experts on cave paintings–guides the reader in an exploration of these intriguing questions, while sharing his firsthand experiences in visiting these exquisite, breath-taking sites.

To grasp what drove these ancient artists to create these masterpieces, and to understand the origin of myth and religion, as Whitley explains, is to appreciate what makes us human. Moreover, he broadens our understanding of the genesis of creativity and myth by proposing a radically new and original theory that weds two seemingly warring camps from separate disciplines.

On the one hand, archaeologists specializing in prehistoric cave paintings have argued that the visionary rituals of shamans led to the creation of this expressive art. They consider shamanism to be the earliest known form of religion. By contrast, evolutionary psychologists view the emergence of religious beliefs as a normal expression of the human mind. In their eyes, the wild and ecstatic trances of shamans were a form of aberrant behavior. Far from being typical representatives of ancient religion, shamans were exceptions to the normal rule of early religion.

Whitley resolves the controversy by interweaving the archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience. He thereby rewrites our understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion.

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen (MIT Press, August 31, 2008)

Product description:

In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen–a cognitive scientist and a logician–argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were “divorced” in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic.

Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results. They draw examples from deductive reasoning, from the child’s development of understandings of mind, from analysis of a psychiatric disorder (autism), and from the search for the evolutionary origins of human higher mental processes.

The picture proposed is one of fast, cheap, automatic but logical processes bringing to bear general knowledge on the interpretation of task, language, and context, thus enabling human reasoners to go beyond the information given. This proposal puts reasoning back at center stage.

I thought this was “coming soon” but it’s already available: The Continuity of Mind (Oxford Psychology) by Michael Spivey (Oxford University Press, 2008)

Product description:

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade now. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach. However, the dynamical-systems perspective on mental activity is now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing it to move beyond the trendy buzzwords that have become associated with it. The Continuity of Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift.

In this book, Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the day’s events involves the coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns over time, i.e., a continuous state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your ‘thoughts’) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that comprises diverse mental states.
Spivey has organized The Continuity of Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. As a result, the apparent partitions that were once thought to separate mental constructs inevitably turn out, upon closer inspection, to be fuzzy graded transitions. The initial chapters provide first-hand demonstrations of the ‘gray areas’ in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters discuss what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space. The Continuity of Mind is essential reading for those in the cognitive and neural sciences who want to see where the Dynamical Cognition movement is taking us.

Jesse Prinz, author of The Emotional Construction of Morals talks to Will Wilkinson at Bloggingheads.tv.

It takes them a few minutes to get rolling…

More on Jesse Prinz (with links to papers)

The Only 127 Things You Need: A Guide To Life’s Essentials by Donna Wilkinson (Tarcher/Penguin, 2008) lists the following essentials for a healthy mind, each further broken down into “essential components”:

• Love and connection: “the ability to form close bonds with others” and “the capacity to give and receive emotional support”
• A sense of control: “A strong belief in your own capabilities,” “resilience,” “optimism and humor,” and “a sense of purpose.”
• Mindfulness and acceptance: “the ability to be present,” “the ability to observe without judgment or criticism,” and “the capacity to notice new things.”
• The ability to be real: “honest self-reflection,” “the capacity to express and feel uncomfortable emotions,” “acceptance of self and others, warts and all,” and “the courage to live your own life.”
• Physical and mental exercise: “regular physical activity” plus “meditation and other mental exercise.”

(extracted from p. 245-308)

Picking up the “mind alphabet” series again… I’d gotten stuck on “H” months ago but having seen “humor” cropping up as a theme in some recent items, it seems like a good excuse to resume.

“Humor shown to be fundamental to our success as a species” from Science Daily (June 16, 2008) discusses the new book Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke (available in the UK, but not even a preorder at Amazon.com). (see also “Finding Patterns” at The Thinking Meat Project)

“Isn’t It Funny?,” New York Review of Books (July 17, 2008) reviews Stop Me If You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes by Jim Holt and Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.- A.D. 250 by John R. Clarke.

Books on humor at the International Society for Humor Studies

More books on humor (hoping the widget works):