my mind on books

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Steven Pinker‘s new book The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature is now available.

Also recently out: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf.

• David Chalmers surveys “recent collections on consciousness”
• detailed review of Sebastian Rödl’s Self Consciousness by Béatrice Longuenesse at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
  

  Self-consciousness, as Rödl defines it, is the power to think of oneself as oneself. This power is fundamentally related to the capacity to use the word “I.” A theory of self-consciousness is thus inseparable from a theory of self-reference: investigating self-consciousness is investigating the way(s) in which “I” refers.

• Priscilla Palmer is compiling a massive list of personal development blogs
  

[Update 9/14 – The personal development list just grew and grew and became a wiki, created by Isabella Mori of change therapy]

The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World by Charles Yang

principles and parameters theory –

“First, there is a set of universal principles, like the principle of structure dependence, that all languages obey. These principles lay out the bounds on how words are put together into phrases, phrases into sentences, and how phrases can (and cannot) move around in sentences. The principles are innate and don’t have to be learned: they explain the absence of the impossible errors like the linear rules that all children steer clear of…..

Second, the differences among languages can be very compactly described by about a few dozen parameters. Learning a language becomes a problem of “twenty questions”: the child needs only to fix the values of the parameters, and that’s it. Now the main thesis, and the subtitle of the book, will make sense. The process of picking parameter values for grammar learning can be given a familiar name: natural selection. The child tries out various options in the parameter system, which turn up as “errors” in her speech: these imperfections actually belong to perfect languages in universal grammar, just not the one she eventually learns. These wrong options, however, cannot last forever; a Bostonian child trying out the parameter values for Japanese will not generally understand English or be understood. Only the grammar actually used in the child’s linguistic environment will not be contradicted, and only the fittest survives. In other words, children learn a language by unlearning all other possible languages.” (p. 31)

categorical perception – the ability to distill a continuous range of signals into discrete units. (p 41) (ex. color perception, speech perception)

variational learning – start with all possible grammars, only the target language persists (p 157)

“parameters that are expressed by more sentences in the environment will be learned faster, because their competitors will be punished more often” (p 171)

Continuing the “mind alphabet”… The intersection between Buddhism and Western brain/mind science is a burgeoning field…

• The Mind & Life Institute has published a series of books based on meetings between the Dalai Lama and Western scientists. The most recent title is Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves.

Other titles:

Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness and Zen-Brain Reflections by James H. Austin

Two Views of Mind: Abhidharma & Brain Science by Christopher deCharms

Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) by B. Alan Wallace