my mind on books

The New York Times Notable Books of 2008 list is out. Here are the more “mind-related” highlights from the nonfiction list (with links to Amazon and to the New York Times review):

Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason by Russell Shorto (NYT review)

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow (NYT review)

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam (NYT review)

How Fiction Works by James Wood (NYT review)

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists by Susan Neiman (NYT review)

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely (NYT review)

A Secular Age by Charles Taylor (NYT review)

The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson (NYT review)

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hadju (NYT review)

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt (NYT review)

Here is a list of books on consciousness published in 2008 plus some of the titles coming in 2009, based on a search at WorldCat. Some things to look forward to in the coming year include new books from James (Zen and the Brain) Austin and Thomas (Being No One) Metzinger.

2008

• The Achilles of rationalist psychology ed. by Thomas M Lennon; Robert Stainton; (Dordrecht; London: Springer, 2008). (publisher info)
• Biological systems of the brain: unlocking the secrets of consciousness by Charles T Ross; Shirley F Redpath (Leicester : Matador, 2008).
• Brain and dissociated mind by Petr Bob (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008).
• Consciousness from zombies to angels: the shadow and the light of knowing who you are by Christian De Quincey (Rochester, Vt. : Park Street Press, 2008) [forthcoming].
• Consciousness in Indian philosophy: the advaita doctrine of “awareness only” by Sthaneshwar Timalsina (New York: Routledge, 2008) [forthcoming].
• Disorders of consciousness (Handbook of Clinical Neurology)ed. by G Bryan Young; Eelco F.M. Wijdicks (Amsterdam ; London : Elsevier, 2008).
• Frontiers of consciousness : the Chichele lectures ed. by Lawrence Weiskrantz; Martin Davies (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008) [forthcoming].
• God and phenomenal consciousness : a novel approach to knowledge arguments by Yujin Nagasawa (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Integral drama : culture, consciousness and identity by William S Haney (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2008).
• Mindreal : how the mind creates its own virtual reality by Robert E Ornstein; ill. by Ted Dewan (Boston: Malor Books, 2008)
• The neurology of consciousness: cognitive neuroscience and neuropathology by Steven Laureys; Giulio Tononi (Amsterdam; London: Academic, 2008).
• Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge : new essays on consciousness and physicalism ed. by Torin Andrew Alter; Sven Walter (New York ; Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Quantum shift in the global brain : how the new scientific reality can change us and our worldby Ervin Laszlo (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008).
• The reflexive nature of consciousness by Greg Janzen (Amsterdam ; Philadelphia : John Benjamins Pub. Co., 2008).
• Sourcing the self : debating the relations between language and consciousness by Kathy Pitt (Oxford : Peter Lang, 2008).
• Transcending the speed of light : consciousness, quantum physics, and the fifth dimension by Marc J Seifer (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008).
• Worldly acts and sentient things: the persistence of agency from Stein to DeLillo by Robert Chodat (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

2009

• Consciousness by Donald F Weaver (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) [July 2009].
• Consciousness revisited: materialism without phenomenal concepts by Michael Tye (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). [March 2009]
• A dialogue on consciousness by Torin Andrew Alter; Robert Howell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). [Jan 2009]
• The ego tunnel: the science of the mind and the myth of the self by Thomas Metzinger (New York : Basic Books, 2009) [March 2009].
• Others in mind: social origins of self-consciousness by Philippe Rochat (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). [Feb 2009]
• Out of our heads: why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness by Alva Noë (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009) [Feb 2009].
• Selfless insight : Zen and the meditative transformations of consciousness by James H Austin (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 2009) [Mar 2009].

I mentioned Gladwell’s new book Outliers: The Story of Success awhile ago, but it seems worth mentioning again, now that the book has been released and there are lots of related links. The Amazon page has a short video from Gladwell introducing his book.

At Gladwell.com there is a Q&A about the book and some excerpts; also an announcement on Gladwell’s blog.

See also:

• Social Capital Blog post
• Google News search
• excerpt at The Guardian
• New York Times review by Michiko Kakutani

Usually this blog focuses on keeping up with all the new books coming out but recently I came across The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books by John W. Santrock, Ann M. Minnett, and Barbara D. Campbell (Guilford Press, 1994), which provided an opportunity to look back at some classic self-help titles.

The book is based on a US survey of 500 mental health professionals who rated over 1000 books in 32 categories. Most of the book reviews the titles by category, rating them from “strongly recommended” to “strongly not recommended.” At the end there is a list of “the twenty-five best self-help books,” those highest rated overall (linked to most current edition at Amazon):

1. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
2. Feeling Good by David Burns
3. Infants and Mothers by T. Berry Brazelton
4. What Every Baby Knows by T. Berry Brazelton
5. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock [8th ed. coauthor is Robert Needlman]
6. How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Melba Colgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams
7. To Listen to a Child by T. Berry Brazelton
8. The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce by Richard Gardner
9. The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
10. The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
11. Toddlers and Parents by T. Berry Brazelton
12. Your Perfect Right by Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons
13. Between Parent and Teenager by Haim Ginott
14. The First Three Years of Life by Burton White
15. What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles
16. Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott
17. The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
18. The New Aerobics by Kenneth Cooper
19. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
20. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
21. Children: The Challenge by Rudolph Dreikurs
22. You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen
23. The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
24. Beyond the Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
25. The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker

More recently, Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Resources in Mental Health, Revised Edition came out in 2003 with some overlap in authors, but going beyond self-help books to include autobiographies, films, online resources and support groups. It will be interesting to see if this edition has a comparable list of top books or top resources.

Beyond “information overload” … The Reality Overload: The Modern World’s Assault on the Imaginal Realm by French Surrealist Annie Le Brun (Inner Traditions, 2008)

Product Description
…
What underlies the many problems of the modern world–from accelerating rates of extinction and desertification to the increased alienation of the individual–is a reality overload, an increasingly invasive mechanization and homogenization of modern life that glorifies consumption and conformity. This overload has been created from the constant force-feeding of too much information, a phenomenon that dispossesses us of our deepest connections to time, our physical world, and each other.

Annie Le Brun explains that the degradation of the environment mirrors the devastation going on in our minds revealing a link between genetically modified foods and the transformation and decay of our language and communication. There is a direct relationship between the rupture of the great biological balances that govern the planet and the equally devastating rupture in our imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is the home of our dreams and the perceptions that feed our thoughts, individuality, and creativity. Without its influence we are forced to live a drab, alienated lifestyle based on consumption alone. If, as Shakespeare claims, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on,” this theft of our imagination by the reality overload threatens the very foundations of our existence.

More information, including table of contents and an excerpt, is available at the publisher’s website.

See also: review at Leonardo Reviews