my mind on books

I’ve been dipping into this book recently: Accidental Genius: Revolutionize Your Thinking Through Private Writing by Mark Levy.
Levy advocates timed private writing, a concept similar to Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” (see The Artist’s Way). What I like about Levy’s book is that he focuses on thinking much more than the process of writing. The book is billed as a business book so the examples tend to be business-oriented, but the process can be applied to any situation. It’s also a nice, short, easy read at around 130 pages.

For example, one chapter talks about “focus-changers” and gives a list of about 35 questions, such as:

• What was I thinking here?
• How else can I say that?
• How can I make this exciting?
• How can I add value?
• Why am I stuck at this particular point?
• What do I think about that?
• What does this remind me of? (p 42-43)

A limited preview is available at Google Book Search.

The author’s website has a “lost” chapter.

What do Michel Foucault and Thich Nhat Hanh have in common? Maybe not much, but both have bestselling books in Amazon’s “Consciousness & Thought” category (and they both live/d in France!)

Amazon’s lists are usually interesting to browse, though their subject categories can sometimes give you an odd assortment of titles. The category “Consciousness & Thought” is found in Books/Nonfiction/Philosophy.

Right now the top five books in this category are

1. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
2. I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (a personal favorite)
3. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction by Michel Foucault
4. The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
5. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts by Clive James

This list should change as Amazon updates their bestseller information: Amazon’s most popular books in Consciousness & Thought

The top five new & future releases in Consciousness & Thought are

1. Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) by B. Alan Wallace
2. The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman
3. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding by Mark Johnson
4. Existentialism Is a Humanism by Jean-Paul Sartre
5. Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?: Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will

Link to the complete and ever-changing list:
Amazon’s bestselling new & future releases in Consciousness & Thought

In honor of Priscilla Palmer’s list of personal development bloggers, which continues to grow, here is a link to Amazon’s most popular books on personal transformation. If this works like I think it will, it should change to show the top books at the time the link is clicked. Right now the most popular book is Choices and Illusions: How Did I Get Where I Am, and How Do I Get Where I Want to Be? by Eldon Taylor.

Following is the full list of personal development bloggers as of now:

(more…)

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.”

“There are two kinds of people…..” (and many ways to divide people into two kinds!)

“Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose.” (from Wikipedia)

A good introduction to the topic for the general reader can be found in The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution by Howard Gardner (New York: Basic Books, 1985, 1987) – Ch. 12 “A World Categorized.”

The work of Eleanor Rosch was instrumental in overturning the classical view of categories based on “necessary and sufficient conditions” in favor of a psychological approach to the structure of categories based on prototypes.

Rosch discusses her work on categorization in this transcribed interview: “Categories have what I called a graded structure of better and worse examples, and many categories have unclear boundaries”

Books on categorization:

• Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind by George Lakoff (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987). [listed first at both WorldCat and LibraryThing, the most popular book on the topic at both institutional and personal libraries]
• Beyond Labeling: The Role of Maternal Input in the Acquisition of Richly-Structured Categories (Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development) by Susan A Gelman et al; Society for Research in Child Development. (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1998). (JSTOR) (more…)