my mind on books

Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness by Jeff Warren, reviewed in the Globe and Mail, also has an intriguing website.

The Head Trip: Adventures on the Wheel of Consciousness is an entrancing taxonomy of waking, sleeping and dreaming states of consciousness. It is a book of psychology and neuroscience, and also of adventure, wherein the author not only comes to a new understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body, but—perhaps mistakenly—comes to believe he possesses thrilling and unusual consciousness superpowers. The many figures, sequential panels and mechanical devices are rendered in the author’s own hand.

“Online Papers in Philosophy” is a blog that tracks, you know, online papers in philosophy, many with abstracts. The latest update (Oct. 19) includes an entry by Thomas Metzinger on “Self Models” at Scholarpedia, part of Scholarpedia’s Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience. (Metzinger is author of ‘Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity‘)

I’ll have to give up on the Amazon slideshow widget at least for now. I thought I had it figured out earlier today; it worked in Internet Explorer but I found out that it didn’t work in Firefox at all. So here is a selection of books on emotion that would have been in the slideshow… (and I apologize for any problems that occurred with the feed):

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

Three by Antonio Damasio:

• Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
• The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness
• Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain

Emotions Revealed, Second Edition: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life by Paul Ekman

Emotion and Consciousness ed. by Lisa Feldman Barrett, Paula M. Niedenthal, and Piotr Winkielman

The Private Life of the Brain: Emotions, Consciousness, and the Secret of the Self by Susan Greenfield

Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama by Daniel Goleman

The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux

What Is an Emotion?: Classic and Contemporary Readings ed, by Robert C. Solomon

I’ve been trying to make an “Amazon Slideshow Widget” but couldn’t get it to work without breaking the WordPress theme, so for now I’ll just point out that a draft version of Marvin Minsky’s book ‘The Emotion Machine” is available from his website, found thanks to Interactive Architecture.org

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, is probably best known for Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

In the last chapter of his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, based on interviews with 91 creative individuals, Csikszentmihalyi offers some practical suggestions for enhancing creativity. These are the summary points discussed more completely in the book:

Try to be surprised by something every day.

Try to surprise at least one person every day.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others.

When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

Wake up in the morning with a specific goal to look forward to.

If you do anything well, it becomes enjoyable.

To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity.

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