my mind on books

The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense by Michael Jawer with Dr. Marc Micozzi (Park Street Press/Inner Traditions, 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

A cutting-edge examination of feelings, not thoughts, as the gateway to understanding consciousness

• Contends that emotion is the greatest influence on personality development

• Offers a new perspective on immunity, stress, and psychosomatic conditions

• Explains how emotion is key to understanding out-of-body experience, apparitions, and other anomalous perceptions

Contemporary science holds that the brain rules the body and generates all our feelings and perceptions. Michael Jawer and Dr. Marc Micozzi disagree. They contend that it is our feelings that underlie our conscious selves and determine what we think and how we conduct our lives.

The less consciousness we have of our emotional being, the more physical disturbances we are likely to have–from ailments such as migraines, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and post-traumatic stress to anomalous perceptions such as apparitions and involuntary out-of-body experiences. Using the latest scientific research on immunity, sensation, stress, cognition, and emotional expression, the authors demonstrate that the way we process our feelings provides a key to who is most likely to experience these phenomena and why. They explain that emotion is a portal into the world of extraordinary perception, and they provide the studies that validate the science behind telepathic dreams, poltergeists, and ESP. The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion challenges the prevailing belief that the brain must necessarily rule the body. Far from being by-products of neurochemistry, the authors show that emotions are the key vehicle by which we can understand ourselves and our interactions with the world around us as well as our most intriguing–and perennially baffling–experiences.

See also: Website for the book for excerpts and more…

John Perry gave the Howison Lecture at Berkeley last March & it is now available online.

Howison lecture description:

In his lecture, John Perry investigates two quite different ways of thinking of ourselves; one, that we express with the first person, that is a special way of considering ourselves; the other, for which we use our name, that allows us to think of ourselves more or less as others do. He will explore these two different ways of thinking, and talking, about ourselves, and draw some conclusions about the structure of thought and language.

Loopholes: Reading Comically by John Bruns (Transaction Publishers, 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

Much writing about comedy in the last twenty years has only trivialized comedy as cheap or as temporary distraction from things that “really matter.” It has either presented exhaustive taxonomies of kinds of humor—like wit, puns, jokes, humor, satire, irony—or engaged in pointless political endgames, moral dialogues, or philosophical perceptions. Comedy is rarely presented as a mode of thought in its own right, as a way of understanding, not something to be understood. Bruns’ guiding assumption is that comedy is not simply a literary or theatrical genre, to be differentiated from tragedy or from romance, but a certain way of disclosing, perhaps undoing, the way the world is organized. When we view the world in terms of what is incompatible, we are reading comically. In this sense, comedy exists outside the alternatives of tragic and comic. It is a form of relief from the difficulties of everyday life. Loopholes argues that trivialization of comedy comes from fear that it will address our anxieties with honesty—and it is this truth that scares us. John Bruns discusses comedy as a mode of thought with a cognitive function. It is a domain of human understanding, a domain far more troubling and accessible than we care to acknowledge. To “read comically” we must accept our fears. If we do so, we will realize what Bruns refers to as the most neglected premise of comedy, that the world itself is a loophole—both incomplete and limitless.

Nothing to do with Memorial Day though, really….

• If you like this blog, you’re probably already reading Neuronarrative, which recently featured an interview with psychologist Bruce Hood, author of SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable. Another recent interview, with Dread author Philip Alcabes, included this quote I enjoyed pondering over: “…once the fantasy scenarios start being painted, the facts become scenery on the stage.”
• Encephalon #71 — Neuroanthropology does a great job as always hosting the blog carnival, with a clever Big Night theme this time (and even a My Mind on Books post!)
• Richard Wrangham, author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, recently appeared as a “blogginghead” in diavlog with John Horgan. Also at bloggingheads: “Percontations: What Should We Believe” with Clayton Littlejohn and Juan Comesana on epistemic justification

“What makes us happy?” in the current issue of The Atlantic looks for lessons in happiness from the Harvard Study of Adult Development with its co-director George Vaillant. Books by Vaillant include Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Books by George Vaillant at Amazon