my mind on books

The post title’s a mashup of three new books: The Dao of Neuroscience, Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life, plus Zombies, Vampires and Philosophy.

The Dao of Neuroscience: Combining Eastern and Western Principles for Optimal Therapeutic Change by C. Alexander Simpkins and Annellen M. Simpkins (W.W. Norton, 2010).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Combining new scientific paradigms with ancient wisdom.

Neuroscientists have made huge advances in our understanding of the brain, and yet as scientists learn more, paradoxes arise. How does the brain—a material substance—relate to and produce nonmaterial thoughts and emotions? What explains the research showing that non-rational, unconscious experiencing can sometimes be more accurate than deliberate, conscious thought? The resolution of these paradoxes has important implications for all the helping fields, suggesting new approaches to mind–brain–body change.

By weaving together Eastern traditions (including Yoga, Buddhism, Zen, and Daoism) and Western science, new understandings previously not considered emerge. The Dao of Neuroscience is an insightful introduction to these traditions which sheds new light on the relationship between the mind and the brain. Dao is an ancient Eastern method, a Way or Path for exploring and learning. From the Eastern perspective, everything has its Dao, its Way, even the brain. As we learn the Dao of neuroscience, we come to understand the brain’s most optimal ways of functioning and how to facilitate its natural processes toward health, happiness, and fulfillment.

Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life by
John B. Arden (Wiley, 2010).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

How to rewire your brain to improve virtually every aspect of your life-based on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology on neuroplasticity and evidence-based practices

Not long ago, it was thought that the brain you were born with was the brain you would die with, and that the brain cells you had at birth were the most you would ever possess. Your brain was thought to be “hardwired” to function in predetermined ways. It turns out that’s not true. Your brain is not hardwired, it’s “softwired” by experience. This book shows you how you can rewire parts of the brain to feel more positive about your life, remain calm during stressful times, and improve your social relationships. Written by a leader in the field of Brain-Based Therapy, it teaches you how to activate the parts of your brain that have been underactivated and calm down those areas that have been hyperactivated so that you feel positive about your life and remain calm during stressful times. You will also learn to improve your memory, boost your mood, have better relationships, and get a good night sleep.

* Reveals how cutting-edge developments in neuroscience, and evidence-based practices can be used to improve your everyday life
* Other titles by Dr. Arden include: Brain-Based Therapy-Adult, Brain-Based Therapy-Child, Improving Your Memory For Dummies and Heal Your Anxiety Workbook
* Dr. Arden is a leader in integrating the new developments in neuroscience with psychotherapy and Director of Training in Mental Health for Kaiser Permanente for the Northern California Region

Explaining exciting new developments in neuroscience and their applications to daily living, Rewire Your Brain will guide you through the process of changing your brain so you can change your life and be free of self-imposed limitations.

Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) ed. by Richard Greene and K. Silem Mohammad (Open Culture, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Since 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, zombie culture has steadily limped and clawed its way into the center of popular culture. Today, zombies and vampires have taken over TV shows, comic books, cartoons, video games, and movies. Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy drags the theories of famous philosophers like Socrates and Descartes into the territory of the undead, exploring questions like: Why do vampires and vegetarians share a similar worldview? Why is understanding zombies the key to health care reform? And what does “healthy in mind and body” mean for vampires and zombies? Answers to these questions and more await readers brave enough to make this fun, philosophical foray into the undead….

This is an expanded and re-titled edition of Open Court’s The Undead and Philosophy: Chicken Soup for the Soulless. It includes two new chapters and a new introduction.

Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan (Bloomsbury, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Cro-Magnons were the first fully modern Europeans—not only the creators of the stunning cave paintings at Lascaux and elsewhere, but the most adaptable and technologically inventive people that had yet lived on earth. The prolonged encounter between the Cro-Magnons and the archaic Neanderthals and between 45,000 and 30,000 years ago was one of the defining moments of history. The Neanderthals survived for some 15,000 years in the face of the newcomers, but were finally pushed aside by the Cro-Magnons’ vastly superior intellectual abilities and cutting-edge technologies, which allowed them to thrive in the intensely challenging climate of the Ice Age.
What do we know about this remarkable takeover? Who were the first modern Europeans and what were they like? How did they manage to thrive in such an extreme environment? And what legacy did they leave behind them after the cold millennia? The age of the Cro-Magnons lasted some 30,000 years—longer than all of recorded history. Cro-Magnon is the story of a little known, yet seminal, chapter of human experience.

See also: Author’s website

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields (Knopf, 2010)

(link for UK)

An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.

Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with “reality” precisely because we experience hardly any.

Most artistic movements are attempts to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art. So, too, every artistic movement or moment needs a credo, from Horace’s Ars Poetica to Lars von Trier’s “Vow of Chastity.” Shields has written the ars poetica for a burgeoning group of interrelated but unconnected artists in a variety of forms and media who, living in an unbearably manufactured and artificial world, are striving to stay open to the possibility of randomness, accident, serendipity, spontaneity; actively courting reader/listener/viewer participation, artistic risk, emotional urgency; breaking larger and larger chunks of “reality” into their work; and, above all, seeking to erase any distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

The questions Reality Hunger explores—the bending of form and genre, the lure and blur of the real—play out constantly all around us. Think of the now endless controversy surrounding the provenance and authenticity of the “real”: A Million Little Pieces, the Obama “Hope” poster, the sequel to The Catcher in the Rye, Robert Capa’s “The Falling Soldier” photograph, the boy who wasn’t in the balloon. Reality Hunger is a rigorous and radical attempt to reframe how we think about “truthiness,” literary license, quotation, appropriation.

Drawing on myriad sources, Shields takes an audacious stance on issues that are being fought over now and will be fought over far into the future. People will either love or hate this book. Its converts will see it as a rallying cry; its detractors will view it as an occasion for defending the status quo. It is certain to be one of the most controversial and talked-about books of the year.

There’s already lots of response to this book, so here is a link to the latest Google news search results.

See also: Author’s website

Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose by Deirdre Barrett (W.W. Norton, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

A Harvard psychologist explains how our once-helpful instincts get hijacked in our garish modern world. Our instincts—for food, sex, or territorial protection— evolved for life on the savannahs 10,000 years ago, not in today’s world of densely populated cities, technological innovations, and pollution. We now have access to a glut of larger-than-life objects, from candy to pornography to atomic weapons—that gratify these gut instincts with often-dangerous results. Animal biologists coined the term “supernormal stimuli” to describe imitations that appeal to primitive instincts and exert a stronger pull than real things, such as soccer balls that geese prefer over eggs. Evolutionary psychologist Deirdre Barrett applies this concept to the alarming disconnect between human instinct and our created environment, demonstrating how supernormal stimuli are a major cause of today’s most pressing problems, including obesity and war. However, Barrett does more than show how unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. She also reminds us that by exercising self-control we can rein them in, potentially saving ourselves and civilization.

Hard to resist a book with a caped librarian superhero! Besides, it got a starred review at Publishers Weekly…

This Book Is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson (Harper, 2010)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Buried in info? Cross-eyed over technology? From the bottom of a pile of paper and discs, books, e-books, and scattered thumb drives comes a cry of hope: Make way for the librarians! They want to help. They’re not selling a thing. And librarians know best how to beat a path through the googolplex sources of information available to us, writes Marilyn Johnson, whose previous book, The Dead Beat, breathed merry life into the obituary-writing profession.

This Book Is Overdue! is a romp through the ranks of information professionals and a revelation for readers burned out on the clichés and stereotyping of librarians. Blunt and obscenely funny bloggers spill their stories in these pages, as do a tattooed, hard-partying children’s librarian; a fresh-scrubbed Catholic couple who teach missionaries to use computers; a blue-haired radical who uses her smartphone to help guide street protestors; a plethora of voluptuous avatars and cybrarians; the quiet, law-abiding librarians gagged by the FBI; and a boxing archivist. These are just a few of the visionaries Johnson captures here, pragmatic idealists who fuse the tools of the digital age with their love for the written word and the enduring values of free speech, open access, and scout-badge-quality assistance to anyone in need.

Those who predicted the death of libraries forgot to consider that in the automated maze of contemporary life, none of us—neither the experts nor the hopelessly baffled—can get along without human help. And not just any help—we need librarians, who won’t charge us by the question or roll their eyes, no matter what we ask. Who are they? What do they know? And how quickly can they save us from being buried by the digital age?

See also: Webpage for the book