my mind on books

Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research by Sue Halpern (Harmony, 2008) is an example of a burgeoning genre I want to call “neuro-memoirs,” nonfiction books that mix first person accounts with neuroscientific information. Halpern’s work falls into the journalistic self-experimentation subgenre, along with titles such as Mind Wide Open by Steven Johnson and Jeff Warren’s Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness.

Halpern investigates memory, from diagnosis of memory disorders, to basic scientific research, to efforts to develop cures. I felt that the beginning chapters in which she undergoes various kinds of brain scans were less engaging (although it could have been because I was reading that part on public transportation), while the book really hits its stride when it starts detailing current research programs, a fascinating portrayal of science in progress.

Unfortunately I had to take the book back to the library today (someone else had reserved it), so I didn’t get much of a chance to take notes. The bibliographic essay at the end looked very good, and I would have liked to look up some of her sources.

(On supposed memory boosters):

“Eating a dozen almonds may just be my generation’s version of Pascal’s wager.”

–Sue Halpern, Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research, p. 7

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker (Random House, 2008) is a new book that’s getting lots of reviews and sounds like it will go well with Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You.

A “sneak peek” at the book is available.

Author’s website

Article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (June 8, 2008)

Mind Hacks post, that links to Salon review (and it turns out that the Salon review also mentions Snoop)

“How the Mind Works: Revelations” by Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff (New York Review of Books, v. 55, n. 11, June 26, 2008) surveys some recent works on neuroscience by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Gerald Edelman, and Giacomo Rizzolatti.

Books discussed in the article (Amazon links added):

The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge (Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative) by Jean-Pierre Changeux, tr. by M.B. DeBevoise (Belknap Press, 2004) [“Search Inside the Book” available at Amazon]
Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors: From Molecular Biology to Cognition by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stuart J. Edelstein (Odile Jacob, 2005) [“Search Inside” available at Amazon]

Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, tr. by M.B. DeBevoise (Princeton University Press, 1995; paperback ed., 1998) [“Search Inside” available]

What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, tr. by M.B. DeBevoise (Princeton University Press, 2000; paperback ed., 2002) [“Search Inside” available]

Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (HarperCollins Quill paperback ed., 1999) [“Search Inside” available]

Mirrors in the brain: How our minds share actions, emotions, and experience by Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, tr. by Frances Anderson (Oxford University Press, 2008) [“Search Inside” available]

A Universe Of Consciousness How Matter Becomes Imagination by Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi (Basic Books, 2001) [“Search Inside” available]

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.