my mind on books

Center for Cognitive Sciences, University of Minnesota has a list of the 100 most influential cognitive science works from the 20th century.

Here are the top five:

1. Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky (1957, 2nd ed. 2002)
2. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information by David Marr (1982)
3. “Computing machinery and intelligence” by A.M. Turing (1950) (Mind, 59, 433-460)
4. The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory by D.O. Hebb (1949, 2002)
5. Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition : Foundations (Parallel Distributed Processing) by D.E. Rumelhart, J.L. McClelland (1986)

The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson is coming soon from the University of Chicago Press, with a scheduled release date of July 15 (according to Amazon.com). Johnson is co-author with George Lakoff of Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Johnson is also the author of The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason.

For more on “embodied cognition”: (1)Embodied cognition: a field guide by Michael L. Anderson (2003, pdf) , (2) article in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Also Evan Thompson, who was a co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, has recently published Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind.

“The main consideration that drives the entire argument of the book is the thesis that the often quirky behaviors of ordinary descriptive predicates derive, not merely from controllable human inattention or carelessness, but from a basic unwillingness of the physical universe to sit still while we frame its descriptive picture. Like a photographer dealing with a rambunctious child, we must resort to odd and roundabout strategies if we hope to capture even a glimpse of our flighty universe upon our linguistic film.” (p. 11)

Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behavior

I came across ‘Garcia’s Heart’ while browsing & thought of a few other examples of “neurofiction,” so here is the start of a list. I’m sure there are many more…

• Garcia’s Heart: A Novel by Liam Durcan (neurologist at a war crimes trial)
• The Echo Maker: A Novel by Richard Powers (Capgras syndrome)
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall (“conceptual shark” attack)
• Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness (Bradford Books) by Dan Lloyd (consciousness theory plus murder mystery)
• Memories of Amnesia by Lawrence Shainberg (brain damage, brain surgery)

12/5/07 – Another to add to the list: Saturday by Ian McEwan (recommended in Proust Was a Neuroscientist)

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.