my mind on books

The current InfoTip from information broker Mary Ellen Bates features Silobreaker, which is primarily a news site, but they do have a neuroscience news page. (Too bad there’s a typo on the top story right now but maybe I will be able to update the screenshot later.) As Bates mentions, there are some interesting data visualization tools on the right sidebar, including displays of article volume, media trends, and a network of related concepts.

[The most current delicious items will now be displayed as the top blog post… (Feed Informer + WP Sticky plugin)] [11/3 update – This hangs up too much!]

Origins of Human Communication (Bradford Books) by Michael Tomasello (MIT Press, 2008)

Product Description
Human communication is grounded in fundamentally cooperative, even shared, intentions. In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially cooperative structure of human (as opposed to other primate) social interaction.

Tomasello argues that human cooperative communication rests on a psychological infrastructure of shared intentionality (joint attention, common ground), evolved originally for collaboration and culture more generally. The basic motives of the infrastructure are helping and sharing: humans communicate to request help, inform others of things helpfully, and share attitudes as a way of bonding within the cultural group. These cooperative motives each created different functional pressures for conventionalizing grammatical constructions. Requesting help in the immediate you-and-me and here-and-now, for example, required very little grammar, but informing and sharing required increasingly complex grammatical devices.

Drawing on empirical research into gestural and vocal communication by great apes and human infants (much of it conducted by his own research team), Tomasello argues further that humans’ cooperative communication emerged first in the natural gestures of pointing and pantomiming. Conventional communication, first gestural and then vocal, evolved only after humans already possessed these natural gestures and their shared intentionality infrastructure along with skills of cultural learning for creating and passing along jointly understood communicative conventions. Challenging the Chomskian view that linguistic knowledge is innate, Tomasello proposes instead that the most fundamental aspects of uniquely human communication are biological adaptations for cooperative social interaction in general and that the purely linguistic dimensions of human communication are cultural conventions and constructions created by and passed along within particular cultural groups.

This book is based on the Jean Nicod Lectures for 2006; outline, videos and handouts are available here.

Book review at Babel’s Dawn, plus two additional posts (found via Neuroanthropology)

Creating Scientific Concepts (Bradford Books) by Nancy Nersessian (MIT Press, 2008) (“Search Inside” the book available at Amazon)

Product Description
How do novel scientific concepts arise? In Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian seeks to answer this central but virtually unasked question in the problem of conceptual change. She argues that the popular image of novel concepts and profound insight bursting forth in a blinding flash of inspiration is mistaken. Instead, novel concepts are shown to arise out of the interplay of three factors: an attempt to solve specific problems; the use of conceptual, analytical, and material resources provided by the cognitive-social-cultural context of the problem; and dynamic processes of reasoning that extend ordinary cognition.

Focusing on the third factor, Nersessian draws on cognitive science research and historical accounts of scientific practices to show how scientific and ordinary cognition lie on a continuum, and how problem-solving practices in one illuminate practices in the other. Her investigations of scientific practices show conceptual change as deriving from the use of analogies, imagistic representations, and thought experiments, integrated with experimental investigations and mathematical analyses. She presents a view of constructed models as hybrid objects, serving as intermediaries between targets and analogical sources in bootstrapping processes. Extending these results, she argues that these complex cognitive operations and structures are not mere aids to discovery, but that together they constitute a powerful form of reasoning—model-based reasoning—that generates novelty. This new approach to mental modeling and analogy, together with Nersessian’s cognitive-historical approach, makes Creating Scientific Concepts equally valuable to cognitive science and philosophy of science.

See also: Author’s webpage

Tom Pettitt of the Institute for Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark, spoke at UC Berkeley Tues. Oct. 21 on “Closing the Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Renaissance of Pre-Modern Media and Mindwork.” The idea of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis” is that the cultural dominance of print is coming to an end, and postmodern media culture is in many ways similar to the pre-modern oral tradition. Therefore mediaeval studies may have some relevance to contemporary media studies.

The Gutenberg era is characterized by the concept of the “free-standing, complete in itself item” which is associated with values of isolation, autonomy, integrity, and stability. This is reflected, for example, in a view of the body as a container or envelope, in contrast to the pre- and post-parenthetical view of the body as articulated, made up of limbs and joints.

The University of Southern Denmark has a “Gutenberg Parenthesis Research Forum.”

We may be in the best of both worlds right now, since certainly books have become so much more accessible than ever before, both in finding out about books to read and the ability to procure them.

For the textually oriented here are some of the books referred to by Prof. Pettit:

Peter Shillingsburg, From Gutenberg to Google: Electronic Representations of Literary Texts (2006)

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New Accents) (1982)

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (originally published in 1994)

Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol, eds., Print, Manuscript, Performance: The Changing Relations of the Media in Early Modern England (2000)

Karin Littau, Theories of Reading (2006)

Guillemette Bolens, La logique du corps articulaire (2000)

Plus a website – The Pathways Project by John Foley: “The major purpose of the Pathways Project is to illustrate and explain the fundamental similarities and correspondences between humankind’s oldest and newest thought-technologies: oral tradition and the internet.”