my mind on books

A lot of “must read” books have been appearing recently, but I don’t want to overlook this one:

The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World (Bradford Books) by Owen Flanagan, professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University.

MIT Press has Table of Contents + Introduction available online.

Flanagan has written on consciousness and participated in the Mind and Life Institute conferences with the Dalai Lama.

Google video from Mind & Reality Symposium

Salon has an interview with Steven Pinker and Rebecca Goldstein (“America’s brainiest couple”!) that I’ve added to the “‘Stuff of Thought’ reading list.”

Oliver Sack’s new book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain is due to be released tomorrow (10/16/07).

Available now: Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer (who blogs at The Frontal Cortex)

Tying the two new books together: Lehrer’s post “Sacks on Music” at the Frontal Cortex

Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and the Science of Being Human by Simeon Locke (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2007)

[scheduled for Dec 30, 2007]

Locke is a Neurologist and Professor Emeritus of Neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Gesture and Thought by David McNeill (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

[pdf essay by the author -“both a synopsis and extension of Gesture and Thought“]

Mental Mechanisms: Philosophical Perspectives on Cognitive Neuroscience by William Bechtel (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007)

According to the publisher, this book is scheduled to be published 10/15/07.

author’s homepage

Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World (Jean Nicod Lectures) by Zenon W. Pylyshyn (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007)

author website

book info from MIT Press

videos from the Jean Nicod Lectures

I’m about a third of the way through ‘Stuff of Thought’ and have been seeing a lot of related articles and reviews, so I’m experimenting here with a reading list created at grazr.com…. (Click on the blue icon to expand.) I’ll be able to add to the list as new items turn up, so feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

With WikiMindMap you can browse Wikipedia topics in mind map format.

Here is the WikiMindMap for “mind”

(Clicking on a term brings up the Wikipedia article; clicking on the green arrows brings that topic to the center of the map; topics with a plus sign in front are expandable.)