my mind on books

Tonight’s NOVA program on “Musical Minds” was based on Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. The program will be available to view online starting tomorrow (July 1, 2009) through the website.

The shadow life of reading begins even while we have the book in hand—begins as soon as we move from the first sentence to the second and start up a memory context. The creation and perpetuation of this context requires that we make a cognitive space, or “open a file,” as it were. Here is the power, the seductiveness of the act: When we read, we create and then occupy a hitherto nonexistent interior locale. Regardless of what happens on the page, the simple fact that we have cleared room for these peculiar figments we now preside over gives us a feeling of freedom and control. No less exalting is the sensation of inner and outer worlds coinciding, going on simultaneously, or very nearly so. … The book is there, waiting, like one of those rare dreams that I half-awaken from and then reenter. Knowing that I have the option of return, this figurative space within the literal space I occupy, changes my relation to that literal space. I am still contained in the world, but I don’t feel trapped in it. Reading creates an imaginary context which then becomes a place of rescue.

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, p. 98

New from MIT Press: Psychology: Pythagoras to Present (Bradford Books) by John C. Malone, Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Product description from the publisher:

Certain ideas have preoccupied thinkers since ancient times: the nature of mind, the sources of knowledge and belief, the nature of the self, ethics and the best way to lead our lives, the question of free will. In this book, John Malone examines these ideas in the writings of thinkers from antiquity to the present day and argues for their importance not just as precursors of modern views but as ideas that are frequently better than current ones. We can get good advice, he writes, from the writings of the best thinkers of the past. Pythagoras, Thales, Plato, Protagoras, Aristotle, Diogenes, and Epictetus all offer tried and tested ideas on how we should lead our lives and on the treatment of psychopathology—as do Berkeley, Hume, John Stuart Mill, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Wilhelm Wundt, William James, Sigmund Freud, and B. F. Skinner.

Malone begins with the naturalistic and mystical strains of early Greek thought, moves on to Platonism and the world of Forms (and considers parallels between the thought of Plato and Freud), and discusses “Ancient Self-Help Therapies” (including Epicureanism). He investigates the psychological insights of Enlightenment thinkers including Francis Bacon and Galileo, Locke’s and Kant’s theories of experience, and Darwin’s evolutionary thinking. He charts the rise of modern psychology and the beginning of “biological psychology.” He examines the work of Wundt, Titchener, Freud, Peirce, and James, among others, and describes the ideas of behaviorism, Gestalt psychology, and cognitive science.

Malone’s history offers both breadth and depth, an engaging style and rigorous scholarship, demonstrating vividly the relevance of the great historical psychological thinkers.

A preview is available at the publisher’s website.

The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision by Mark Changizi (BenBella Books, 2009)

Product description from the publisher:

Primates evolved binocular vision (both eyes facing forward) so that they can see in three dimensions, critical as they jumped from branch to branch. Higher primates developed color vision to better hunt out ripe fruit. Optical illusions succeed because they exploit the limitations of our visual processing. Wrong!

All of these beliefs are false, as groundbreaking research by evolutionary scientist and neurobiologist Mark Changizi now reveals. Changizi’s research centers on the “why” of human vision. Why do we have binocular vision? Why do we see in color the way we do? Why do optical illusions work? And why are we able to absorb information by reading?a very new invention from an evolutionary perspective?more readily than by hearing, which we’ve evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years?

The Vision Revolution answers these questions, and proves, with the detailed results of Changizi’s fieldwork, that the answers are very different than traditionally believed. A radically new perspective of human vision is now emerging. The Vision Revolution is upon us.

See also: book excerpt from the Wall Street Journal

Author’s website

“The Vision Revolution” at Scientific Blogging

Caught in Play: How Entertainment Works on You by Peter Stromberg, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa (Stanford University Press, 2009).

Product description from the publisher:

Most of us have become so immersed in a book or game or movie that the activity temporarily assumed a profound significance and the outside world began to fade. Although we are likely to enjoy these experiences in the realm of entertainment, we rarely think about what effect they might be having on us. Precisely because it is so pervasive, entertainment is difficult to understand and even to talk about.

To understand the social role of entertainment, Caught in Play looks closely at how we engage entertainment and at the ideas and practices it creates and sustains. Though entertainment is for fun, it does not follow that it is trivial in its effect on our lives. As this work reveals, entertainment generates commitments to values we are not always willing to acknowledge: values of pleasure, self-indulgence, and consumption.

The book has a website.