my mind on books

The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, 2010)

(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks tells the stories of people who are able to navigate the world and communicate with others despite losing what many of us consider indispensable senses and abilities: the power of speech, the capacity to recognize faces, the sense of three-dimensional space, the ability to read, the sense of sight. For all of these people, the challenge is to adapt to a radically new way of being in the world.

There is Lilian, a concert pianist who becomes unable to read music and is eventually unable even to recognize everyday objects, and Sue, a neurobiologist who has never seen in three dimensions, until she suddenly acquires stereoscopic vision in her fifties.

There is Pat, who reinvents herself as a loving grandmother and active member of her community, despite the fact that she has aphasia and cannot utter a sentence, and Howard, a prolific novelist who must find a way to continue his life as a writer even after a stroke destroys his ability to read.

And there is Dr. Sacks himself, who tells the story of his own eye cancer and the bizarre and disconcerting effects of losing vision to one side.

Sacks explores some very strange paradoxes—people who can see perfectly well but cannot recognize their own children, and blind people who become hyper-visual or who navigate by “tongue vision.” He also considers more fundamental questions: How do we see? How do we think? How important is internal imagery—or vision, for that matter? Why is it that, although writing is only five thousand years old, humans have a universal, seemingly innate, potential for reading?

The Mind’s Eye is a testament to the complexity of vision and the brain and to the power of creativity and adaptation. And it provides a whole new perspective on the power of language and communication, as we try to imagine what it is to see with another person’s eyes, or another person’s mind.

See also: Author’s website, interview

Note for Firefox users: the full screen view doesn’t seem to be working on the individual post page, though it does work on the main page; in Chrome and IE it worked on both pages.

This is the first time I’ve come across a book with “Kindle for the Web” enabled so I can embed the first chapter right here. (Note the full-screen option in the center of the title bar.) The book is ‘Fame: A Novel in Five Episodes’ which the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer today called “a rare and thrilling example of a philosophical novel as pleasurable as it is thought-provoking.”

(link for amazon.co.uk)

The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction by Rebecca Costa (Vanguard Press, 2010).

(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Why can’t we solve our problems anymore? Why do threats such as the Gulf oil spill, worldwide recession, terrorism, and global warming suddenly seem unstoppable? Are there limits to the kinds of problems humans can solve?

Rebecca Costa confronts—and offers a solution to—these questions in her highly anticipated and game-changing book, The Watchman’s Rattle.

Costa pulls headlines from today’s news to demonstrate how accelerating complexity quickly outpaces the rate at which the human brain can develop new capabilities. With compelling evidence based on research into the rise and fall of the Mayan, Khmer, and Roman empires, Costa shows how the tendency to find a quick fix to problems by focusing on symptoms—instead of searching for permanent solutions—leads to frightening long-term consequences: society’s ability to solve its most challenging, intractable problems becomes gridlocked, progress slows, and collapse ensues.

A provocative new voice in the tradition of thought leaders Thomas Friedman, Jared Diamond, and Malcolm Gladwell, Costa reveals how we can reverse the downward spiral. Part history, part social science, part biology, The Watchman’s Rattle is sure to provoke, engage, and incite change.

See also: Author’s website

How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar (Harvard University Press, 2010)

(link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Why do men talk and women gossip, and which is better for you? Why is monogamy a drain on the brain? And why should you be suspicious of someone who has more than 150 friends on Facebook?

We are the product of our evolutionary history, and this history colors our everyday lives—from why we joke to the depth of our religious beliefs. In How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Robin Dunbar uses groundbreaking experiments that have forever changed the way evolutionary biologists explain how the distant past underpins our current ­behavior.

We know so much more now than Darwin ever did, but the core of modern evolutionary theory lies firmly in Darwin’s elegantly simple idea: organisms behave in ways that enhance the frequency with which genes are passed on to future generations. This idea is at the heart of Dunbar’s book, which seeks to explain why humans behave as they do. Stimulating, provocative, and immensely enjoyable, his book invites you to explore the number of friends you have, whether you have your father’s brain or your mother’s, whether morning sickness might actually be good for you, why Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was a foregone conclusion, what Gaelic has to do with frankincense, and why we laugh. In the process, Dunbar examines the role of religion in human evolution, the fact that most of us have unexpectedly famous ancestors, and why men and women never seem able to see eye to eye on color.

See also: Interview at guardian.co.uk, webpage at Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Dunbar at RSA: