my mind on books

Why Lyrics Last: Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Brian Boyd (Harvard University Press, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

In “Why Lyrics Last”, the internationally acclaimed critic Brian Boyd turns an evolutionary lens on the subject of lyric verse. He finds that lyric making, though it presents no advantages for the species in terms of survival and reproduction, is “universal across cultures because it fits constraints of the human mind.” An evolutionary perspective – especially when coupled with insights from aesthetics and literary history – has much to tell us about both verse and the lyrical impulse.

Boyd places the writing of lyrical verse within the human disposition “to play with pattern,” and in an extended example he uncovers the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare’s bid for readership is unlike that of any sonneteer before him: he deliberately avoids all narrative, choosing to maximize the openness of the lyric and demonstrating the power that verse can have when liberated of story.

In eschewing narrative, Shakespeare plays freely with patterns of other kinds: words, images, sounds, structures; emotions and moods; argument and analogy; and natural rhythms, in daily, seasonal, and life cycles. In the originality of his stratagems, and in their sheer number and variety, both within and between sonnets, Shakespeare outdoes all competitors. A reading of the Sonnets informed by evolution is primed to attend to these complexities and better able to appreciate Shakespeare’s remarkable gambit for immortal fame.

The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision by Mark Changizi is currently only $1.79 in the US kindle edition. (Prices subject to change, so be sure to doublecheck before you buy.)

Book description from the publisher:

In The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew About Human Vision, Mark Changizi, prominent neuroscientist and vision expert, addresses four areas of human vision and provides explanations for why we have those particular abilities, complete with a number of full-color illustrations to demonstrate his conclusions and to engage the reader. Written for both the casual reader and the science buff hungry for new information, The Vision Revolution is a resource that dispels commonly believed perceptions about sight and offers answers drawn from the field’s most recent research.

Changizi focuses on four “why” questions:
1. Why do we see in color?
2. Why do our eyes face forward?
3. Why do we see illusions?
4. Why does reading come so naturally to us?

Currently $2.69 for the Kindle edition:
Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World by Thomas Hayden and Malcolm Potts

Book description from the publisher:

As news of war and terror dominates the headlines, scientist Malcolm Potts and veteran journalist Thomas Hayden take a step back to explain it all. In the spirit of Guns, Germs and Steel, Sex and War asks the basic questions: Why is war so fundamental to our species? And what can we do about it?

Malcolm Potts explores these questions from the frontlines, as a witness to war-torn countries around the world. As a scientist and obstetrician, Potts has worked with governments and aid organizations globally, and in the trenches with women who have been raped and brutalized in the course of war. Combining their own experience with scientific findings in primatology, genetics and anthropology, Potts and Hayden explain war’s pivotal position in the human experience and how men in particular evolved under conditions that favored gang behavior, rape and organized aggression. Drawing on these new insights, they propose a rational plan for making warfare less frequent and less brutal in the future.

Anyone interested in understanding human nature, warfare, and terrorism at their most fundamental levels will find Sex and War to be an illuminating work, and one that might change the way they see the world.

As noted here earlier, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Theory and Interpretation of Narrative) by Lisa Zunshine is (still) only $1.99 for the kindle.

Book description from the publisher:

Why We Read Fiction offers a lucid overview of the most exciting area of research in contemporary cognitive psychology known as “Theory of Mind” and discusses its implications for literary studies. It covers a broad range of fictional narratives, from Richardson’s Clarissa, Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice to Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. Zunshine’s surprising new interpretations of well-known literary texts and popular cultural representations constantly prod her readers to rethink their own interest in fictional narrative. Written for a general audience, this study provides a jargon-free introduction to the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field known as cognitive approaches to literature and culture.

FT Press Science frequently offers free ebooks for the Kindle: currently Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (FT Press Science).

Book description from the publisher:

This is the eBook version of the printed book.

James A. Shapiro proposes an important new paradigm for understanding biological evolution, the core organizing principle of biology. Shapiro introduces crucial new molecular evidence that tests the conventional scientific view of evolution based on the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and shows why this view is inadequate to today’s evidence. He then presents a compelling alternative view of the evolutionary process that reflects the shift in life sciences towards a more information- and systems-based approach.

Shapiro integrates advances in symbiogenesis, epigenetics, and saltationism into a unified approach that views evolutionary change as an active cell process, regulated epigenetically and capable of making rapid large changes by horizontal DNA transfer, inter-specific hybridization, whole genome doubling, symbiogenesis, or massive genome restructuring.

Evolution: A View from the 21st Century marshals extensive evidence in support of a fundamental reinterpretation of evolutionary processes, including more than 1,100 references to the scientific literature. Shapiro’s work will generate extensive discussion throughout the biological community, and may significantly change your own thinking about how life has evolved. It also has major implications for evolutionary computation, information science, and the growing synthesis of the physical and biological sciences.

Also, in case you missed it, each month Amazon features “100 Kindle books for $3.99 or less”. Highlights for March include:

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty for $3.99

What Is Intelligence? by James R. Flynn for $3.99

Your Brain on Food: How Chemicals Control Your Thoughts and Feelings by Gary Wenk for $1.99

Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style by Randy Olson for $1.99

The Misleading Mind: How We Create Our Own Problems and How Buddhist Psychology Can Help Us Solve Them by Karuna Cayton (New World Library, 2012)

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

Book description from the publisher:

Buddhism asserts that we each have the potential to free ourselves from the prison of our problems. As practiced for more than twenty-six hundred years, the process involves working with, rather than against, our depression, anxiety, and compulsions. We do this by recognizing the habitual ways our minds perceive and react — the way they mislead. The lively exercises and inspiring real-world examples Cayton provides can help you transform intractable problems and neutralize suffering by cultivating a radically liberating self-understanding.

Google books preview:

See also: Author Q & A, book website

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel L. Everett (Pantheon, 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 22 Mar 2012)

Book description from the publisher:

A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain—as most linguists do—but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide.

For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. But linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He shows how the evolution of different language forms—that is, different grammar—reflects how language is influenced by human societies and experiences, and how it expresses their great variety.

For example, the Amazonian Pirahã put words together in ways that violate our long-held understanding of how language works, and Pirahã grammar expresses complex ideas very differently than English grammar does. Drawing on the Wari’ language of Brazil, Everett explains that speakers of all languages, in constructing their stories, omit things that all members of the culture understand. In addition, Everett discusses how some cultures can get by without words for numbers or counting, without verbs for “to say” or “to give,” illustrating how the very nature of what’s important in a language is culturally determined.

Combining anthropology, primatology, computer science, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and his own pioneering—and adventurous—research with the Amazonian Pirahã, and using insights from many different languages and cultures, Everett gives us an unprecedented elucidation of this society-defined nature of language. In doing so, he also gives us a new understanding of how we think and who we are.

Google books preview:

See also: Author’s website

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (Pantheon, 2012)

(kindle ed.), (amazon.co.uk – 29 Mar 2012)

Book description from the publisher:

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

His starting point is moral intuition—the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim—that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations. In a stunning final chapter on ideology and civility, Haidt shows what each side is right about, and why we need the insights of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians to flourish as a nation.

Google books preview:

See also: Book website