my mind on books

Susan Blackmore’s recent TED Talk on memes and “temes” (techno-memes) is up at TED and, if all goes well, embedded above.
Blackmore wrote one of the best books on the concept of memetics — The Meme Machine — and is also known to consciousness investigators as author of Consciousness: An Introduction, Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think about the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to Be Human, and more.

update 6/5 -Blackmore has a bibliography on memetics at her website.

Sciousness by Jonathan Bricklin explores nondual aspects of William James’s thought, especially his notion of “sciousness.”

More of a review coming soon, but here is an excerpt from Bricklin’s essay (p. 71):

The reverberation of striving for and against, of welcoming and opposing, that generates the sense of self, defines a range within which all emotions arise. Every emotion is found somewhere between them. To focus, however, as James does, exclusively on the movement between the polar opposites of welcoming and opposing is to lose sight of a more fundamental movement between a neutral state of consciousness and all others — that is, the movement between sciousness and con-sciousness. To describe the feeling of self without reference to sciousness is like describing sound without silence — the silence that forms the contour of any sound that is heard. Just as there can be no sense of sound without a sense of silence, there can be no sense of self without a non-self background to give it definition. “The palpitating inward life” of welcoming and opposing cannot itself give rise to self-feeling any more than the change from soft to loud gives rise to sound. As sound is defined by its contrast to silence, so, too, the “reverberation” (second beat) of “I” is defined by its contrast to a first beat non-“I.”

Following is a list of cognitive science books new/forthcoming in 2008, to be added to the list in the sidebar. This selection is based on a search of WorldCat, so they are titles that have been chosen by libraries. [6/13 – just updated a few titles that have since been released]

Applied Attention Theory by Christopher D Wickens and Jason S McCarley (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2008)

Applying Cognitive Science to Education: Thinking and Learning in Scientific and Other Complex Domains (Bradford Books) by F Reif (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT, 2008) forthcoming

Better Than Conscious?: Decision Making, the Human Mind, and Implications for Institutions ed. by Christoph Engel and Wolf Singer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)

Beyond Happiness: Deepening the Dialogue Between Buddhism, Psychotherapy and the Mind Sciences by Gay Watson (London: Karnac Books, 2008)

The Bounds of Cognition by Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa (Malden, Mass.; Oxford : Blackwell Pub., 2008)

The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology (Cambridge Handbook Of…)ed. by Ron Sun (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Cognitive Economics by Bernard Walliser (Berlin: Springer, 2008)

Cognitive Science (SAGE Benchmarks in Psychology Series) ed. by Koen Lamberts (Los Angeles; London: SAGE, 2008). 6 vols.

Cognitive Science Compendium ed. by Miao-Kun Sun (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008) forthcoming

Cognitive Sciences Research Progress ed. by Miao-Kun Sun (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2008) forthcoming

Creative Model Construction in Scientists and Students: The Role of Imagery, Analogy, and Mental Simulation by John J Clement (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2008) forthcoming

History of Cognitive Neuroscience by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) forthcoming

Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008) forthcoming

I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science by Daniela Isac and Charles Reiss (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008) (textbook)

The Innate Mind: Vol. 3, Foundations and the Future (Evolution and Cognition)ed. by Peter Carruthers; Stephen Laurence; Stephen P Stich (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Midbrain Mutiny: The Picoeconomics and Neuroeconomics of Disordered Gambling: Economic Theory and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Don Ross; et al (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008)

Mind and Cognition: An Anthology, 3rd ed. (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies) ed. by William G Lycan and Jesse J Prinz (Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell Pub. Ltd, 2008)

Mind, Brain and the Elusive Soul: Human Systems of Cognitive Science and Religion by Mark Graves (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2008)

Models of Brain and Mind: Physical, Computational and Psychological Approaches (Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168) ed. by Rahul Banerjee; B K Chakrabarti (Amsterdam; London: Elsevier, 2008)

Neuroeconomics: A Guide to the New Science of Making Choices by Peter E Politser (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Novel Approaches in Cognitive Informatics and Natural Intelligence ed. by Yingxu Wang (Hershey, Pa. : Information Science Reference, 2009) forthcoming

The Probabilistic Mind: Prospects for Bayesian Cognitive Science by Nick Chater and M Oaksford (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative by Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) forthcoming

Truly Understood by Christopher Peacocke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)