my mind on books

At the bookstore today I browsed through The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner, a breezy, humorous sort of travelogue looking at the relationship between place and happiness. Weiner starts at the World Database of Happiness in the Netherlands, then visits Switzerland, Bhutan, Qatar, Iceland, Moldova (an example of an unhappy place), Thailand, Great Britain, India and the US.

Reviews: here, here (for the Moldovan perspective), and here.

The Author’s website includes a slideshow on Bhutan.

The Emotional Construction of Morals by Jesse Prinz (Oxford University Press, Dec. 28, 2007).
From the book description: “Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection.”

author’s website, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

excerpts (24 p pdf draft)

article “The Emotional Basis of Moral Judgments,” Philosophical Explorations, March 2006 (16 p pdf)

I still haven’t quite settled on a book for the first Book A Month Challenge (“read a book about time”). I came across this list, a few years old but covering a lot of different genres: C.S. Lewis Summer Institute’s Bibliography for Time and Eternity. From that list, I thought this title sounded interesting: A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time by Michael Flaherty.

Also J.T. Fraser has written a lot of books about time (link to books by J.T. Fraser)

Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang sounds like a good layperson’s guide, due out in March, and already garnering some enthusiastic endorsements.

Neuroeconomics: A Guide to the New Science of Making Choices by Peter Politser is coming in Feb. from Oxford University Press.

………

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but here is a reminder that V.S. Ramachandran has a new book scheduled to be released next week: The Man with the Phantom Twin: Adventures in the Neuroscience of the Human Brain.

The Book A Month Challenge theme for January is time, an excellent choice that should be easy to connect with “books on the mind.” I think the hard part will be picking out one book to read! I’d especially like to find a good book on subjective time experience, or maybe something in the anthropology of time, comparing time experiences across cultures. Here are some possibilities:

• An Experiment With Time (Studies in Consciousness) by J.W. Dunne – a classic
• Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness (Perspectives in Cognitive Neuroscience) by Benjamin Libet
• The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation by Robin Le Poidevin

Or, already in my library waiting to be read (sometime!):

• Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past by Eviatar Zerubavel
• The Story of Time (an exhibition catalog with essays by Umberto Eco and others)

Here’s a “LibraryThing tagmash” on time, mind

and one on time, anthropology