my mind on books

The News: A User’s Manual by Alain de Botton (Pantheon, 2014)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed.)

Book description from the publisher:

The news is everywhere. We can’t stop constantly checking it on our computer screens, but what is this doing to our minds?

We are never really taught how to make sense of the torrent of news we face every day, writes Alain de Botton (author of the best-selling The Architecture of Happiness), but this has a huge impact on our sense of what matters and of how we should lead our lives. In his dazzling new book, de Botton takes twenty-five archetypal news stories—including an airplane crash, a murder, a celebrity interview and a political scandal—and submits them to unusually intense analysis with a view to helping us navigate our news-soaked age. He raises such questions as Why are disaster stories often so uplifting? What makes the love lives of celebrities so interesting? Why do we enjoy watching politicians being brought down? Why are upheavals in far-off lands often so boring?

In The News: A User’s Manual, de Botton has written the ultimate guide for our frenzied era, certain to bring calm, understanding and a measure of sanity to our daily (perhaps even hourly) interactions with the news machine.

Google Books preview:

What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night, ed. by John Brockman (Harper, 2014)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Drawing from the horizons of science, today’s leading thinkers reveal the hidden threats nobody is talking about—and expose the false fears everyone else is distracted by.

What should we be worried about? That is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org (“The world’s smartest website”—The Guardian), posed to the planet’s most influential minds. He asked them to disclose something that, for scientific reasons, worries them—particularly scenarios that aren’t on the popular radar yet. Encompassing neuroscience, economics, philosophy, physics, psychology, biology, and more—here are 150 ideas that will revolutionize your understanding of the world.

Steven Pinker uncovers the real risk factors for war * Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi peers into the coming virtual abyss * Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek laments our squandered opportunities to prevent global catastrophe * Seth Lloyd calculates the threat of a financial black hole * Alison Gopnik on the loss of childhood * Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains why firefighters understand risk far better than economic “experts” * Matt Ridley on the alarming re-emergence of superstition * Daniel C. Dennett and george dyson ponder the impact of a major breakdown of the Internet * Jennifer Jacquet fears human-induced damage to the planet due to “the Anthropocebo Effect” * Douglas Rushkoff fears humanity is losing its soul * Nicholas Carr on the “patience deficit” * Tim O’Reilly foresees a coming new Dark Age * Scott Atran on the homogenization of human experience * Sherry Turkle explores what’s lost when kids are constantly connected * Kevin Kelly outlines the looming “underpopulation bomb” * Helen Fisher on the fate of men * Lawrence Krauss dreads what we don’t know about the universe * Susan Blackmore on the loss of manual skills * Kate Jeffery on the death of death * plus J. Craig Venter, Daniel Goleman, Virginia Heffernan, Sam Harris, Brian Eno, Martin Rees, and more

Google Books preview:

See also: Annual Question at Edge.org

A Natural History of Human Thinking by Michael Tomasello (Harvard University Press, 2013)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed.)

Book description from the publisher:

Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.

Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today’s great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.

A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s webpage

Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes by Viki McCabe (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk), (UK kindle ed)

Book description from the publisher:

In this fascinating book cognitive scientist Viki McCabe argues that the catastrophes we now face–economic recessions, ecological devastation, and political paralysis–originate in our ignoring the world we perceive and acting on the theories we conceive. Using cutting-edge research and compelling true stories– the Wall Street banking fiasco, the submerging of New Orleans, and the escalation of global temperatures– McCabe argues that these problems originate in our relying on the wrong source for our information: the archives within our heads with their opinions and biases, instead of our subliminal perceptions of what is happening on the ground.

McCabe shows that while our “mind’s eye” “sees” a world made of separate, nameable parts, the earth actually operates as a coalition of complex working systems (from cells to cities to economies). Such systems cannot be understood in words, but require fractal-like configurations that our perceptual systems have evolved to parse and that reflect each system’s structure, characteristics, and functions. Thus, we comprehend systems as disparate as neural networks, river deltas, and economies not from their verbal descriptions, but by perceiving their branching structure. We recognize others as they walk from the figure eight that oscillates around their belly buttons. Form not only follows function, it doubles as information.

McCabe also documents how using this information saved the USS Missouri, a kidnapped child, and victims of the Asian tsunami. Thus, she counsels us to put our mentally manufactured theories aside and focus on our perceptions so that we can reconnect to reality, make more informed decisions, block hostile mental takeovers, and come back to our senses.

Google Books preview:

$2.99 kindle ebook – 'Making the American Self' by Daniel Walker Howe http://t.co/fKGlGUSTK7 via @amazon

— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) January 20, 2014

(Part of the “Big Deal” through Feb 2)