my mind on books

Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average by Joseph T. Hallinan (Broadway, 2009).

According to Amazon, this book is being released tomorrow, but my local Barnes & Noble had it on the shelves yesterday.

Book Description
We forget our passwords. We pay too much to go to the gym. We think we’d be happier if we lived in California (we wouldn’t), and we think we should stick with our first answer on tests (we shouldn’t). Why do we make mistakes? And could we do a little better?

We human beings have design flaws. Our eyes play tricks on us, our stories change in the retelling, and most of us are fairly sure we’re way above average. In Why We Make Mistakes, journalist Joseph T. Hallinan sets out to explore the captivating science of human error–how we think, see, remember, and forget, and how this sets us up for wholly irresistible mistakes.

In his quest to understand our imperfections, Hallinan delves into psychology, neuroscience, and economics, with forays into aviation, consumer behavior, geography, football, stock picking, and more. He discovers that some of the same qualities that make us efficient also make us error prone. We learn to move rapidly through the world, quickly recognizing patterns–but overlooking details. Which is why thirteen-year-old boys discover errors that NASA scientists miss—and why you can’t find the beer in your refrigerator.

Why We Make Mistakes is enlivened by real-life stories–of weathermen whose predictions are uncannily accurate and a witness who sent an innocent man to jail–and offers valuable advice, such as how to remember where you’ve hidden something important. You’ll learn why multitasking is a bad idea, why men make errors women don’t, and why most people think San Diego is west of Reno (it’s not).

Why We Make Mistakes will open your eyes to the reasons behind your mistakes–and have you vowing to do better the next time.

The book’s website has excerpts, links, and a blog.

Here’s a review, from Cheryl Truman on books.

Doing without Concepts by Edouard Machery (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Publisher’s description:

Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework.

In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists’ goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone interested in cognitive science’s emerging view of the mind will find Machery’s provocative ideas of interest.

See also: “Concepts and Experimental Philosophy” and “Doing Without Concepts” at Brains

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by UC Berkeley philosopher Alva Noë (one of the philosophers interviewed in the recent book ‘Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions‘) is due out from Hill and Wang on Feb. 17 (according to Amazon) or Feb. 24 (according to the publisher).

(link for UK)

Publisher’s description:

Alva Noë is one of a new breed—part philosopher, part cognitive scientist, part neuroscientist—who are radically altering the study of consciousness by asking difficult questions and pointing out obvious flaws in the current science. In Out of Our Heads, he restates and reexamines the problem of consciousness, and then proposes a startling solution: Do away with the two hundred-year-old paradigm that places consciousness within the confines of the brain.

Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue.

In this inventive work, Noë suggests that rather than being something that happens inside us, consciousness is something we do. Debunking an outmoded philosophy that holds the scientific study of consciousness captive, Out of Our Heads is a fresh attempt at understanding our minds and how we interact with the world around us.

See also: Alva Noë on Edge.org

David Chalmers mentioned this book awhile ago and I just noticed it is available now: Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions ed. by Patrick Grim (Automatic, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product Description
Debates concerning the nature of mind and consciousness are active and ongoing, with implications for philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence and the neurosciences. This book collects interviews with some of the foremost philosophers of mind, focusing on open questions, promising projects, and their own intellectual histories. The result is a rich glimpse of the contemporary debate through some of the people who make it what it is. Interviews with Lynne Rudder Baker, David Chalmers, Daniel Dennett, Fred Dretske, Owen Flanagan, Samuel Guttenplan, Valerie Gray Hardcastle, John Heil, Terence Horgan, Douglas Hofstadter, Frank Jackson, Jaegwon Kim, William Lycan, Alva Noë, Hilary Putnam, David Rosenthal, John Searle, Steven Stich, Galen Strawson, Michael Tye.

Daniel Tammet provides a window into the mind of an autistic savant in Embracing the Wide Sky: A Tour Across the Horizons of the Mind, while stressing the continuities between savant and non-savant mental abilities.

He suggests that savant abilities might be the result of “cross-talk” or hyperconnectivity between regions of the brain that are ordinarily inhibited from communicating:

Various scientists have speculated on the possibility that a range of neurological conditions, from autism and epilepsy to schizophrenia, might be related to reduced levels of inhibition in the brain, causing abnormal cross-communication between usually separate brain regions. Cognitive scientist Ed Hubbard has argued that such activity within the brain might also account for the multisensory experience of synesthesia. Reduced levels of inhibition in the brain may also play a role in savant abilities: the savant Kim Peek was born without the corpus callosum – the thick band of tissues that connects the left and right hemispheres, and which also serves as the main inhibitory pathway in the brain. …. Specifically I believe that my numerical abilities are linked to activity in the region of my brain responsible for syntactical organization. (p. 138-139)

Tammet goes on to describe the “languageness” of his numerical abilities, for example:

Just as it would be impossible to talk about the word “giraffe” without words like “neck” or “tall,” so it is impossible for me to talk meaningfully about the number 23 without referring to such relations as 529 or 989. (p. 141)

He also relates this hyperconnectivity to creativity in Chapter 6.

Unfortunately the book has no notes and the bibliography is incomplete, so there are no sources given for many of the researchers cited in the book. For example there is a quote from Peter Slezak on p. 137-138 with no reference under that name in the bibliography. (I located the source, an “All in the Mind” radio program from 22 Oct 2005.)

Coincidentally, Embracing the Wide Sky was featured in today’s VSL:Science post.

A previous post on this book has some related links.