my mind on books

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson (found via TED Blog) is published by Viking.

Product Description
From one of the world’s leading thinkers and speakers on creativity and self-fulfillment, a breakthrough book about talent, passion, and achievement

The element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. When people arrive at the element, they feel most themselves and most inspired and achieve at their highest levels. The Element draws on the stories of a wide range of people, from ex-Beatle Paul McCartney to Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons; from Meg Ryan to Gillian Lynne, who choreographed the Broadway productions of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera; and from writer Arianna Huffington to renowned physicist Richard Feynman and others, including business leaders and athletes. It explores the components of this new paradigm: The diversity of intelligence, the power of imagination and creativity, and the importance of commitment to our own capabilities.

With a wry sense of humor, Ken Robinson looks at the conditions that enable us to find ourselves in the element and those that stifle that possibility. He shows that age and occupation are no barrier, and that once we have found our path we can help others to do so as well. The Element shows the vital need to enhance creativity and innovation by thinking differently about human resources and imagination. It is also an essential strategy for transforming education, business, and communities to meet the challenges of living and succeeding in the twenty-first century.

See also: website for The Element

An earlier book by Ken Robinson is Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

Self, Logic, and Figurative Thinking by Harwood Fisher (Columbia University Press, 2008).

Product Description

Harwood Fisher argues against neuroscientific and cognitive scientific explanations of mental states, for they fail to account for the gaps between actions in the brain, cognitive operations, linguistic mapping, and an individual’s account of experience. Fisher probes a rich array of thought from the primitive and the dream to the artistic figure of speech, and extending to the scientific metaphor. He draws on first-person methodologies to restore the conscious self to a primary function in the generation of figurative thinking.

How does the individual originate and organize terms and ideas? How can we differentiate between different types of thought and account for their origins? Fisher depicts the self as mediator between trope and logical form. Conversely, he explicates the creation and articulation of the self through interplay between logic and icon. Fisher explains how the “I” can step out of scripted roles. The self is neither a discursive agent of postmodern linguistics nor a socially determined entity. Rather, it is a historically situated, dynamically constituted place at the crossroads of conscious agency and unconscious actions and evolving contextual logics and figures.

Fisher is a professor emeritus of City College of New York; an earlier book of his is The Subjective Self: A Portrait inside Logical Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2001) (reviewed at Metapsychology)

For “browsing into the future,” here is a list of cognitive science books coming in 2009, including related subject terms “cognition” and “cognitive psychology,” based on a search of WorldCat:

Cognitive archaeology and human evolution ed. by Sophie A de Beaune; Frederick L Coolidge; Thomas Wynn (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). June 2009

Cognitive biology : evolutionary and developmental perspectives on mind, brain, and behavior ed. by Luca Tommasi; Mary A Peterson; Lynn Nadel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). July 2009

Computation, cognition, and Pylyshyn ed. by Don Dedrick; Lana Trick (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2009). July 2009

Emotion and the psychodynamics of the cerebellum: a neuro-psychoanalytical analysis and synthesis by Fred Levin (London: Karnac, 2009). March 2009

Foundations in evolutionary cognitive neuroscience : introduction to the discipline ed. by Steven M Platek; Todd K Shackelford (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). March 2009

Ignorance : on the wider implications of deficient knowledge by Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Feb 2009 (Amazon has this marked as a 2nd ed. but I couldn’t turn up an earlier edition.)

In two minds: dual processes and beyond ed. by Jonathan Evans; Keith Frankish (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Sept 2009

Memory and the computational brain : why cognitive science will transform neuroscience by C R Gallistel; Adam Philip King (Chichester, West Sussex, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). May 2009

On the Origins of Cognitive Science: the mechanization of mind by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). April 2009

Perception and cognition : essays in the philosophy of psychology Gary C Hatfield (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2009). Aug 2009

The philosophical baby : what children’s minds tell us about truth, love, and the meaning of life by Alison Gopnik (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009). Aug 2009

The rise of homo sapiens : the evolution of modern thinking by Frederick L Coolidge; Thomas Wynn (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). April 2009

The sapient mind: archaeology meets neuroscience ed. by Colin Renfrew; Christopher D Frith; Lambros Malafouris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Sept 2009

Supernatural agents: why we believe in souls, gods and buddhas by Ilkka Pyysiäinen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). May 2009

Wednesday is indigo blue: discovering the brain of synesthesia by Richard E Cytowic; David Eagleman (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2009). April 2009

This post was prompted when I saw that the website 43Things has put out a new book: Dream It. List It. Do It!: How to Live a Bigger & Bolder Life, from the Life List Experts at 43Things.com. (More about the book at 43Things)

For example at 43Things, “10,016 people want to read more books”!

Another book to check out for help in following through on goals and resolutions is This Year I Will…: How to Finally Change a Habit, Keep a Resolution, or Make a Dream Come True by M.J. Ryan (Broadway, 2006).

From the author’s website:

Why do people find it so hard to change? The secret is that everyone has their own formula for making changes that stick, but most people don’t know what theirs is. They think there is one way to lose five pounds, and another way to stay on top of their email, but they don’t realize that for all changes, there is one system that works best for each individual. This Year I Will helps you lock on to your unique formula for planning, implementing, and seeing a life change through, so you can use it again and again to tackle anything else you’d like to do.

Joe’s Goals, a free online habit tracker, is one of the sites featured in Lifehacker’s tips on how to “Set and track New Year’s Resolutions with free software.”