my mind on books

A recent article in Wired alerted me to this book, which is now available: Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell (Dutton Adult, 2009)

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

THE TOTAL RECALL REVOLUTION IS INEVITABLE.

IT WILL CHANGE WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN.

IT HAS ALREADY BEGUN.

What if you could remember everything? Soon, if you choose, you will be able to conveniently and affordably record your whole life in minute detail. You would have Total Recall. Authors Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell draw on experience from their MyLifeBits project at Microsoft Research to explain the benefits to come from an earth-shaking and inevitable increase in electronic memories. In 1998 they began using Bell, a luminary in the computer world, as a test case, attempting to digitally record as much of his life as possible. Photos, letters, and memorabilia were scanned. Everything he did on his computer was captured. He wore an automatic camera, an arm-strap that logged his bio-metrics, and began recording telephone calls. This experiment, and the system created to support it, put them at the center of a movement studying the creation and enjoyment of e-memories.

Since then the three streams of technology feeding the Total Recall revolution– digital recording, digital storage, and digital search, have become gushing torrents. We are capturing so much of our lives now, be it on the date–and location–stamped photos we take with our smart phones or in the continuous records we have of our emails, instant messages, and tweets–not to mention the GPS tracking of our movements many cars and smart phones do automatically. We are storing what we capture either out there in the “cloud” of services such as Facebook or on our very own increasingly massive and cheap hard drives. But the critical technology, and perhaps least understood, is our magical new ability to find the information we want in the mountain of data that is our past. And not just Google it, but data mine it so that, say, we can chart how much exercise we have been doing in the last four weeks in comparison with what we did four years ago. In health, education, work life, and our personal lives, the Total Recall revolution is going to change everything. As Bell and Gemmell show, it has already begun.

Total Recall provides a glimpse of the near future. Imagine heart monitors woven into your clothes and tiny wearable audio and visual recorders automatically capturing what you see and hear. Imagine being able to summon up the e-memories of your great grandfather and his avatar giving you advice about whether or not to go to college, accept that job offer, or get married. The range of potential insights is truly awesome. But Bell and Gemmell also show how you can begin to take better advantage of this new technology right now. From how to navigate the serious questions of privacy and serious problem of application compatibility to what kind of startups Bell is willing to invest in and which scanner he prefers, this is a book about a turning point in human knowledge as well as an immediate and practical guide.

Total Recall is a technological revolution that will accomplish nothing less than a transformation in the way humans think about the meaning of their lives. “What would happen if we could instantly access all the information we were exposed to throughout our lives?” -Bill Gates, from the Foreword

See also: website for the book

Consciousness Explained Better: Towards an Integral Understanding of the Multifaceted Nature of Consciousness by Allan Combs (Paragon House, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

This title offers a thorough and insightful exploration of human consciousness in all its forms. “Consciousness Explained Better” offers readers an insightful, down-to-earth, and above all, easy-to-understand exploration of consciousness in its many facets and forms. Grounded in the author’s thorough understanding of the various aspects and development of consciousness, this superbly written volume examines human consciousness from a wide range of view-points – its historical evolution, its growth in the individual, its mystical dimensions, and the meaning of enlightenment – giving readers a greater understanding of how these aspects of consciousness combine to create the kaleidoscopic yet lucid experience that is the essence of humanity.

Allan Combs is on the faculty of the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Why We Cooperate (Boston Review Books) by Michael Tomasello (MIT Press, 2009)
(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

Drop something in front of a two-year-old, and she’s likely to pick it up for you. This is not a learned behavior, psychologist Michael Tomasello argues. Through observations of young children in experiments he himself has designed, Tomasello shows that children are naturally—and uniquely—cooperative. Put through similar experiments, for example, apes demonstrate the ability to work together and share, but choose not to.

As children grow, their almost reflexive desire to help—without expectation of reward—becomes shaped by culture. They become more aware of being a member of a group. Groups convey mutual expectations, and thus may either encourage or discourage altruism and collaboration. Either way, cooperation emerges as a distinctly human combination of innate and learned behavior.

In Why We Cooperate, Tomasello’s studies of young children and great apes help identify the underlying psychological processes that very likely supported humans’ earliest forms of complex collaboration and, ultimately, our unique forms of cultural organization, from the evolution of tolerance and trust to the creation of such group-level structures as cultural norms and institutions.

Scholars Carol Dweck, Joan Silk, Brian Skyrms, and Elizabeth Spelke respond to Tomasello’s findings and explore the implications.

A Boston Review Book

DK Publishing produces beautifully illustrated books on a variety of subjects, now including the coffeetable-worthy Human Brain Book (+ DVD) by Rita Carter.

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

The Human Brain Book is a complete guide to the one organ in the body that makes each of us what we are – unique individuals. It combines the latest findings from the field of neuroscience with expert text and state-of-the-art illustrations and imaging techniques to provide an incomparable insight into every facet of the brain. Layer by layer, it reveals the fascinating details of this remarkable structure, covering all the key anatomy and delving into the inner workings of the mind, unlocking its many mysteries, and helping you to understand what’s going on in those millions of little gray and white cells.

Tricky concepts are illustrated and explained with clarity and precision, as The Human Brain Book looks at how the brain sends messages to the rest of the body, how we think and feel, how we perform unconscious actions (for example breathing), explores the nature of genius, asks why we behave the way we do, explains how we see and hear things, and how and why we dream. Physical and psychological disorders affecting the brain and nervous system are clearly illustrated and summarized in easy-to-understand terms.

The unique DVD brings the subject to life with interactive elements. These include a clickable model of the brain’s structure that allows the user to zoom in and discover deeper layers of detail, while complex processes, such as the journey of a nerve impulse, are broken down and simplified through intuitive animations.

Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Bradford Books) by Anthony Chemero (MIT Press, 2009).

(link for UK)

Product description from the publisher:

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach (which he terms radical embodied cognitive science), puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and John Dewey, and it follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, “shored up” and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems (reductionism, epistemological skepticism, metaphysical realism, consciousness) through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. “Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher,” Chemero writes in his preface, adding, “I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything.” With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. A Bradford Book

See also: author’s website