books on the mind, consciousness, cognitive science…
August 31, 2012
out in paperback: The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain … by Iain McGilchrist amazon.com/gp/product/030… via
@amazon— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) August 31, 2012
August 30, 2012
One of Amazon’s Best Books of September is already in stock: How Music Works by David Byrne (McSweeney’s, 2012)
Book description from the publisher:
How Music Works is David Byrne’s remarkable and buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about. In it he explores how profoundly music is shaped by its time and place, and he explains how the advent of recording technology in the twentieth century forever changed our relationship to playing, performing, and listening to music.
Acting as historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, he searches for patterns—and shows how those patterns have affected his own work over the years with Talking Heads and his many collaborators, from Brian Eno to Caetano Veloso. Byrne sees music as part of a larger, almost Darwinian pattern of adaptations and responses to its cultural and physical context. His range is panoptic, taking us from Wagnerian opera houses to African villages, from his earliest high school reel-to-reel recordings to his latest work in a home music studio (and all the big studios in between).
Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, life-affirming power.
See also: Author’s website
August 29, 2012
How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Vision, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times by Peter S. Wells (Princeton University Press, 2012)
Book description from the publisher:
The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome’s literate civilization and today’s industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how they communicated their thoughts, feelings, and visual perceptions through the everyday tools they shaped, the pottery and metal ornaments they decorated, and the arrangements of objects they made in their ritual places–and how these forms and patterns in turn shaped their experience.
How Ancient Europeans Saw the World offers a completely new approach to the study of Bronze Age and Iron Age Europe, and represents a major challenge to existing views about prehistoric cultures. The book demonstrates why we cannot interpret the structures that Europe’s pre-Roman inhabitants built in the landscape, the ways they arranged their settlements and burial sites, or the complex patterning of their art on the basis of what these things look like to us. Rather, we must view these objects and visual patterns as they were meant to be seen by the ancient peoples who fashioned them.
Google Books preview (scroll past blank page):
See also: Book’s Facebook page
August 28, 2012
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird (Princeton University Press, 2012)
Book description from the publisher:
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking presents practical, lively, and inspiring ways for you to become more successful through better thinking. The idea is simple: You can learn how to think far better by adopting specific strategies. Brilliant people aren’t a special breed–they just use their minds differently. By using the straightforward and thought-provoking techniques in The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, you will regularly find imaginative solutions to difficult challenges, and you will discover new ways of looking at your world and yourself–revealing previously hidden opportunities.
The book offers real-life stories, explicit action items, and concrete methods that allow you to attain a deeper understanding of any issue, exploit the power of failure as a step toward success, develop a habit of creating probing questions, see the world of ideas as an ever-flowing stream of thought, and embrace the uplifting reality that we are all capable of change. No matter who you are, the practical mind-sets introduced in the book will empower you to realize any goal in a more creative, intelligent, and effective manner. Filled with engaging examples that unlock truths about thinking in every walk of life, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking is written for all who want to reach their fullest potential–including students, parents, teachers, businesspeople, professionals, athletes, artists, leaders, and lifelong learners.
Whenever you are stuck, need a new idea, or want to learn and grow, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking will inspire and guide you on your way.
Google Books preview (scroll past blank cover page):
See also: Book’s Facebook page
August 25, 2012
$2.99 kindle ebook: ‘Natural Psychology: The New Psychology of Meaning’ by Eric Maisel amazon.com/gp/product/B00… via
@amazon— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) August 26, 2012
