my mind on books

Beyond Boundaries: The New Neuroscience of Connecting Brains with Machines—and How It Will Change Our Lives by Miguel Nicolelis (Times Books, 2011)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

A pioneering neuroscientist shows how the long-sought merger of brains with machines is about to become a paradigm-shifting reality

Imagine living in a world where people use their computers, drive their cars, and communicate with one another simply by thinking. In this stunning and inspiring work, Duke University neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis shares his revolutionary insights into how the brain creates thought and the human sense of self—and how this might be augmented by machines, so that the entire universe will be within our reach.

Beyond Boundaries draws on Nicolelis’s ground-breaking research with monkeys that he taught to control the movements of a robot located halfway around the globe by using brain signals alone. Nicolelis’s work with primates has uncovered a new method for capturing brain function—by recording rich neuronal symphonies rather than the activity of single neurons. His lab is now paving the way for a new treatment for Parkinson’s, silk-thin exoskeletons to grant mobility to the paralyzed, and breathtaking leaps in space exploration, global communication, manufacturing, and more.

Beyond Boundaries promises to reshape our concept of the technological future, to a world filled with promise and hope.

See also: Book website

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind by Robin Fox (Harvard University Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

We began as savages, and savagery has served us well—it got us where we are. But how do our tribal impulses, still in place and in play, fit in the highly complex, civilized world we inhabit today? This question, raised by thinkers from Freud to Levi-Strauss, is fully explored in this book by the acclaimed anthropologist Robin Fox. It takes up what he sees as the main—and urgent—task of evolutionary science: not so much to explain what we do, as to explain what we do at our peril.

Ranging from incest and arranged marriage to poetry and myth to human rights and pop icons, Fox sets out to show how a variety of human behaviors reveal traces of their tribal roots, and how this evolutionary past limits our capacity for action. Among the questions he raises: How real is our notion of time? Is there a human “right” to vengeance? Are we democratic by nature? Are cultural studies and fascism cousins under the skin? Is evolutionary history coming to an end—or just getting more interesting? In his famously informative and entertaining fashion, drawing links from Volkswagens to Bartok to Woody Guthrie, from Swinburne to Seinfeld, Fox traces our ongoing struggle to maintain open societies in the face of profoundly tribal human needs—needs which, paradoxically, hold the key to our survival.

See also: Author’s website, interview on WNYC

This is a list of books on consciousness published or forthcoming in 2011, based on a search at WorldCat, with links to Amazon [& publication month in square brackets]:

Altering Consciousness: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 2 vols. ed. by Etzel Cardeña; Michael Winkelman (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011-) [May] (amazon.co.uk – May)

Chimeras and Consciousness: Evolution of the Sensory Self ed. by Lynn Margulis; Celeste A Asikainen; Wolfgang E Krumbein (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011) [Apr] (amazon.co.uk – Mar)

Consciousness: An Introduction, 2nd ed. by Susan J Blackmore (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) [Feb] (amazon.co.uk – Apr)

Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (Philosophy of Mind) by Derk Pereboom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) [Mar] (amazon.co.uk – May)

Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition by Michelle Maiese (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) [Feb] (amazon.co.uk – Dec 2010)

The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English (Frontiers of Narrative) ed. by David Herman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011) [listed as May, but already available in March 2011] (amazon.co.uk – May)

Experimental Phenomena of Consciousness: A Brief Dictionary, Revised Edition by Talis Bachmann; Bruno G Breitmeyer; Haluk Ögmen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) [Apr]

Investigating Pristine Inner Experience: Moments of Truth by Russell T Hurlburt (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) [Jul] (amazon.co.uk -Jul)

Living Consciousness: The Metaphysical Vision of Henri Bergson by G William Barnard (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011) [Dec] (no Amazon link yet – publisher info)

The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness by Richard Dien Winfield (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011) [Jul] “explores the biological foundations of psychology from a broadly Hegelian perspective”

The Mind: Leading Scientists Explore the Brain, Memory, Consciousness, and Personality by John Brockman (New York: Harper Perennial, 2011) [Aug] (amazon.co.uk – Aug)

Perplexities of Consciousness (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology) by Eric Schwitzgebel (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011) [Feb] (amazon.co.uk – Feb)

Phenomenal Consciousness: Understanding the Relation Between Experience and Neural Processes in the Brain by Dimitris Platchias (Montreal; Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) [Mar] (amazon.co.uk – Oct 2010)

Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Consciousness by Rex Welshon (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011) [Feb] (amazon.co.uk – Nov 2010)

Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future ed. by Moshe Bar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) [May] (amazon.co.uk – May)

Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness by Nicholas Humphrey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011) [Feb] (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – Jan)

Wednesday’s Child: From Heidegger to Affective Neuroscience, a Field Theory of Angst by Gregory Schulz (Eugene, Or.: Wipf & Stock, 2011) [Jan] (amazon.co.uk – Jan)

Who Was Mrs Willett?: Landscapes and Dynamics of Mind by Chris Nunn (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011) [Jan] (amazon.co.uk – Jan)

Why Red Doesn’t Sound Like a Bell: Understanding the feel of consciousness by J K O’Regan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) [Jun] (amazon.co.uk – Jun)

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril by Margaret Heffernan (New York: Walker, 2011) [Mar] (kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – Feb)

*****
These MIT Press titles listed on WorldCat could not be found at Amazon or on the publisher’s website, but may turn up later:

–Meditating selflessly: practical neural Zen by James H Austin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011)

–Re-emergence: locating conscious properties in a material world by Gerald Vision (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011)

–The wonder of consciousness: understanding the mind through philosophical reflection by Harold L Langsam (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011)

See also: Consciousness books 2007-2010

A notable recent title with “starred reviews” from both Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist:

The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive by Brian Christian (Doubleday, 2011)

(kindle edition), (amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

The Most Human Human is a provocative, exuberant, and profound exploration of the ways in which computers are reshaping our ideas of what it means to be human. Its starting point is the annual Turing Test, which pits artificial intelligence programs against people to determine if computers can “think.”

Named for computer pioneer Alan Turing, the Tur­ing Test convenes a panel of judges who pose questions—ranging anywhere from celebrity gossip to moral conundrums—to hidden contestants in an attempt to discern which is human and which is a computer. The machine that most often fools the panel wins the Most Human Computer Award. But there is also a prize, bizarre and intriguing, for the Most Human Human.

In 2008, the top AI program came short of passing the Turing Test by just one astonishing vote. In 2009, Brian Christian was chosen to participate, and he set out to make sure Homo sapiens would prevail.

The author’s quest to be deemed more human than a com­puter opens a window onto our own nature. Interweaving modern phenomena like customer service “chatbots” and men using programmed dialogue to pick up women in bars with insights from fields as diverse as chess, psychiatry, and the law, Brian Christian examines the philosophical, bio­logical, and moral issues raised by the Turing Test.

One central definition of human has been “a being that could reason.” If computers can reason, what does that mean for the special place we reserve for humanity?

See also: “Mind vs Machine,” The Atlantic, March 2011 (adapted from the book),
Author on The Daily Show

Related title: Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything

Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr. (MIT Press, 2011)

(amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Hurley, Dennett, and Adams describe the evolutionary reasons for humor and for laughter. They examine why humor is pleasurable and desirable, often sharable, surprising, playful, nonsensical, and insightful. They give an “inside,” mechanistic account of the cognitive and emotional apparatus that provides the humor experience, and they use it to explain the wide variety of things that are found to be humorous. They also provide a preliminary sketch of an emotional and computational model of humor, arguing that (Star Trek‘s Data to the contrary) any truly intelligent computational agent could not be engineered without humor.