my mind on books

Today I attended a lecture by Dr. Paul Ekman (see also Wikipedia article) on the UC Berkeley campus. Dr. Ekman spoke about his early research showing the universality of facial expressions of emotion, then demonstrated a computer-based system for training people to recognize microexpressions (brief expressions that indicate concealed emotion), and discussed work in progress on facial expressions warning of dangerous intent.

He said “Emotions do not reveal their source,” so fear can be detected but not the reason, the target or the trigger for the emotion.

Something to look forward to next fall – a new book based on a dialog between Ekman and the Dalai Lama; I had written down the title as ‘Emotional Awareness’ but on his website the title is shown as ‘Steps Towards Emotional Balance’ (and not even at the pre-order stage on Amazon yet.)

link to video interview from 2004

“Questioning consciousness” by Nicholas Humphrey

In On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not, neurologist Robert Burton challenges the notions of how we think about what we know. He shows that the feeling of certainty we have when we “know” something comes from sources beyond our control and knowledge. In fact, certainty is a mental sensation, rather than evidence of fact. Because this “feeling of knowing” seems like confirmation of knowledge, we tend to think of it as a product of reason. But an increasing body of evidence suggests that feelings such as certainty stem from primitive areas of the brain, and are independent of active, conscious reflection and reasoning. The feeling of knowing happens to us; we cannot make it happen.

I think he must mean “philosophical fiction“….

Link to “Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing”

The website New Brain-New World covers some of the same territory as Jeff Warren’s The ‘Head Trip’:

“New Brain-New World presents cutting edge brain research regarding Altered States of Consciousness, the awakened brain, and neurofeedback training for the transformation of consciousness.”