my mind on books

I’ve been trying out BookMooch over the past few days and having a good time with it. It seems to be a fairly active community of sharers. LibraryThing has integrated with BookMooch and other book sharing sites so you can check from a book’s LibraryThing page to see if copies are available or if people have it on their wishlists. I decided to give it a try after reading some discussion about BookMooch at LibraryThing. Of course, donating books to the local library is a good way to recycle them too!

As of this writing, I have a copy of The Creative Attitude by Roger Schank available in case anyone wants to “mooch” it (if you don’t mind “ex-library, no dust jacket”). I’m “D.A. Foster” at BookMooch, so let me know if you join up.

The Walrus has a review article on evolutionary psychology, discussing or citing a number of books starting with Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and including What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture by Edward Slingerland (Cambridge University Press, 2008), plus The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative ed. by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (Northwestern University Press, 2005).

The Walrus article concludes by citing recent research by Takahiko Masuda:

When presented with a smiling face against a background of contrary expressions, the Japanese, unlike the North Americans, had significant doubts about whether the face truly represented “happiness.” Much more than the North Americans, the Japanese took context into account and concluded that, despite the smiley face, an individual surrounded by unhappy people might not feel all that happy. Like the display rules Ekman had formulated from his own analysis of American and Japanese cultures, Masuda’s work points to what might be termed “context rules” that affect the actual experiencing of emotion.

Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works by Shimon Edelman is due out from Oxford University Press on Aug. 20 (according to Oxford) or Sept. 8 (according to Amazon) in the US.

Here is the product description:

In a culmination of humanity’s millennia-long quest for self knowledge, the sciences of the mind are now in a position to offer concrete, empirically validated answers to the most fundamental questions about human nature. What does it mean to be a mind? How is the mind related to the brain? How are minds shaped by their embodiment and environment? What are the principles behind cognitive functions such as perception, memory, language, thought, and consciousness?

By analyzing the tasks facing any sentient being that is subject to stimulation and a pressure to act, Shimon Edelman identifies computation as the common denominator in the emerging answers to all these questions. Any system composed of elements that exchange signals with each other and occasionally with the rest of the world can be said to be engaged in computation. A brain composed of neurons is one example of a system that computes, and the computations that the neurons collectively carry out constitute the brain’s mind.

Edelman presents a computational account of the entire spectrum of cognitive phenomena that constitutes the mind. He begins with sentience, and uses examples from visual perception to demonstrate that it must, at its very core, be a type of computation. Throughout his account, Edelman acknowledges the human mind’s biological origins. Along the way, he also demystifies traits such as creativity, language, and individual and collective consciousness, and hints at how naturally evolved minds can transcend some of their limitations by moving to computational substrates other than brains. The account that Edelman gives in this book is accessible, yet unified and rigorous, and the big picture he presents is supported by evidence ranging from neurobiology to computer science. The book should be read by anyone seeking a comprehensive and current introduction to cognitive psychology.

The author’s website includes a link to a table of contents.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick (W.W. Norton, 2008)

Product description:

John T. Cacioppo’s groundbreaking research topples one of the pillars of modern medicine and psychology: the focus on the individual as the unit of inquiry. By employing brain scans, monitoring blood pressure, and analyzing immune function, he demonstrates the overpowering influence of social context—a factor so strong that it can alter DNA replication. He defines an unrecognized syndrome—chronic loneliness—brings it out of the shadow of its cousin depression, and shows how this subjective sense of social isolation uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behavior, and physiology, becoming a trap that not only reinforces isolation but can also lead to early death. He gives the lie to the Hobbesian view of human nature as a “war of all against all,” and he shows how social cooperation is, in fact, humanity’s defining characteristic. Most important, he shows how we can break the trap of isolation for our benefit both as individuals and as a society.

The website for the book is www.scienceofloneliness.com