my mind on books

BAMM! 2007 – A daylong meeting for SF Bay Area researchers on memory and cognitive control – is being planned for Saturday August 25, 2007; registration is only $25. The final schedule is not yet available. Link for more information.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Author David Linden has a rich website and blog for his recent book on brain evolution, ‘The Accidental Mind.’ You can even print out notecards based on illustrations from the book!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Daniel B. Smith, author of ‘Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination’ is scheduled to appear on the Colbert Report tonight (Comedy Central, 11:30p/10:30c).

I caught myself looking longingly at the fiction after a spate of nonfiction, so I picked up a copy of Glasshouse by Charles Stross, which turned out to be an entertaining “thought-experiment” dealing with issues of mind and identity, wrapped in a good story.

In Stross’s future, memories can be erased, personalities edited, people regularly make back-up copies of themselves, and their minds can be placed in different bodies. Problems and issues such as these arise:

p 2 – “It’s tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.”

p 15 – “Not wearing a face in public is a deliberate snub.”

The action soon moves to an experimental simulation of a ‘Dark Ages’ society (c. 1950-2040), which affords a look back at the present-day world from the future perspective.

At Stross’s website, www.accelerando.org, his earlier book Accelerando is available as a free ebook.

Author’s blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/

Via Mind Hacks, Brad Pasanek’s “Mind is a metaphor” website has a blog and a database of metaphors from British 18th-century literature. Pasanek’s site has a link to the Open University’s Metaphor Analysis Project, which has collected some papers on contemporary theories of metaphor, starting with Lakoff & Johnson.