my mind on books

Decision-making turns out to be a popular topic, spanning self-help, business management, cognitive psychology, and various applied fields.

Below I have selected some titles published within the last few years (2005-2007), starred a couple that looked most interesting for the general reader (or to me at least), followed by links to some other book lists. [10/8/07 – added a section for reader recommendations ]

The Book of Hard Choices: How to Make the Right Decisions at Work and Keep Your Self-Respect by James A Autry; Peter Roy (New York : Morgan Road Books, 2006). [business-oriented]

Decision Making: 5 Steps to Better Results (Harvard Business Essentials) (Boston, Mass. : Harvard Business School ; London : McGraw-Hill [distributor], 2006). [business-oriented]

Decision Making & Problem Solving Strategies (Creating Success) by John Eric Adair (London ; Philadelphia : Kogan Page, 2007). [business-oriented]

Decision-making in Complex Environments ed. by Malcolm Cook; Janet M Noyes; Yvonne Masakowski (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). [technical/specialized]

Emotion and Reason: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Decision Making by Alain Berthoz; tr. Giselle Weiss (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2006).

*The Era of Choice: The Ability to Choose and Its Transformation of Contemporary Life (Bradford Books) by Edward C Rosenthal (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2005).

(more…)

Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory by Roger C. Schank

Most of the public writing I’ve done up to now has been fairly academic – from college papers to abstracts of journal articles. This book by Roger Schank (who is forever associated in my mind with the “restaurant script”) has started to change the way I think about writing. Instead of thinking of the information I want to impart and how to organize it, Schank prompts me to think more in terms of “what story can I tell about this?”

Schank discusses the relationship between storytelling and intelligence, conversation as a process of responsive storytelling, and how stories are stored in memory:

Stories are a way of preserving the connectivity of events that would otherwise be disassociated over time. (p.124)

Near the end of the book (p. 221-237) Schank suggests that greater intelligence involves extending normal human abilities along seven dimensions. The dimensions are

• data finding (“the more that interests you the better memory you are likely to have,” p. 224)
• data manipulation (“the more successfully you adapt old stories, the more creative you are,” p. 226)
• comprehension (“intelligence means being interested in explaining as much as possible rather than explaining away as much as possible,” p. 229)
• explanation (“Failure is valuable because it encourages explanation,” p. 231)
• planning (“the more intelligent you are, the more you can create new plans,” p. 233)
• communication (“the more ideas are discussed, the more insights one will come to,” p. 235)
• integration (“the smartest of us becomes curious about certain aspects of what we encounter, and it is precisely those aspects that are worth focusing on,” p. 241)

Schank is also the author of The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent and The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions (among others).

Thanks again to Mind Hacks, this time for pointing to “A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking” by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman at Edge.org.

Last February I attended two lectures by Kahneman at UC Berkeley, on intuition and happiness, which are archived here (near the top, under Hitchcock lectures). There’s some other good stuff on that page as well, including lectures on consciousness by Christof Koch and Thomas Metzinger.

For a “book tie-in” – the classic work by Kahneman, with Amos Tversky, is Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

search results for books by Daniel Kahneman at Amazon

Important Books on the Brain: An Annotated Bibliography of Fiction and Non-Fiction

“The following descriptions focus on widely praised books about the brain, both scientific and literary. The selections are excerpted from articles in Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science.”

Steven Pinker‘s new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature is now available.

Also recently out: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.