my mind on books

Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert received the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

p224-227. Gilbert identifies three shortcomings of the imagination that prevent us from knowing what will make us happy: 1. tendency to fill in/leave out things unconsciously, 2. tendency to project the present onto the future, 3. failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen. (Things will look better because the “psychological immune system” will transform meaning.)

The best way to predict is to see how others feel after similar experiences, but “our mythical belief in the variability and uniqueness of individuals is the main reason why we refuse to use others as surrogates” (p 232).

I hope to find a more systematic way of monitoring new & forthcoming titles, but meanwhile here are some that look interesting (found by the “poking around” method). Feel free to add more suggestions in the comments!

Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner (April 3, 2007)
The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong by Jennifer Michael Hecht (April 10, 2007)
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (April 17, 2007)
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo (March 27, 2007)
Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity And the New Science of Ideas by Richard Ogle (Amazon says “June 5, 2007” but it is already available)
Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, And Language by Maxwell Bennett, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle (May 2007)
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God by David J. Linden (March 31, 2007)
Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind by Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth (May 15, 2007)
The World in My Mind, My Mind in the World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in People, Animals and Machines by Igor Aleksander (May 1, 2007)
The Character of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind) by David Chalmers (March 1, 2008)
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker (September 11, 2007)

Joseph Levine, Professor of Philosophy at University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently discussed “Can Science Explain Consciousness?” on the radio program Philosophy Talk. A RealAudio file of the program is available here.

Levine is the author of Purple Haze: The Puzzle of Consciousness (Philosophy of Mind Series)

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson is my May selection for the Non-Fiction Five Challenge. The subtitle is “The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World.” The epidemic in question is the cholera epidemic of 1854, but the book is not morbid. It focuses on the efforts of two men, Dr. John Snow and Rev. Henry Whitehead, as they put their local knowledge to work to investigate the cause of the disease.

The miasma theory of disease predominated at the time, and the organism that causes cholera, Vibrio cholerae, had not yet been identified (except by one Italian researcher whose findings were not widely known at the time). Johnson traces in detail the evidence and reasoning that led Snow to conclude that the disease is waterborne, rather than a result of “bad air” according to the miasma theory.

One result of Snow’s investigation was the creation of a famous map that showed the spread of the disease in relation to the water from a particular pump. The map was often reproduced and this helped promote the waterborne theory.

Johnson also suggests that this episode marked a turning point in urban history, from a time when the viability of large cities seemed doubtful to a time when city living has become healthier and more sustainable than rural living.

In an appendix “Notes on Further Reading,” Johnson points to an extensive website devoted to John Snow, hosted by the UCLA Dept. of Epidemiology. Among the suggested books, one that I might want to look at is Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping, and Medicine by Tom Koch.

The author’s blog: stevenberlinjohnson.com

His other books are Everything Bad is Good for You,

Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life,

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software,

and Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

I’ll look forward to his next title.