my mind on books

From now until August 23, Amazon.com’s Kindle store is offering “The Big Deal” – over 500 ebooks from $0.99 to $3.99. As Amazon states: “Individual titles may have additional territory restrictions, and not all deals are available in all territories.”

Browse the “Big Deal” selections in General Nonfiction; Health, Mind and Body; Business & Investing.

Selections include:

79 Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut for $3.99

What is Analytic Philosophy? by Hans-Johann Glock for $3.99

What Science Offers the Humanities by Edward Slingerland for $3.99

What Philosophers Know: Case Studies in Recent Analytic Philosophy by Gary Gutting for $3.99

The Selfish Meme: A Critical Reassessment by Kate Distin for $3.99

The Normal Personality: A New Way of Thinking about People by Steven Reiss for $3.99

A Unified Theory of Happiness by Andrea F. Polard for $3.99

Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes our Past by Douwe Draaisma for $3.99

Richard Rorty (Contemporary Philosophy in Focus) ed. by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley for $3.99

Religion and Anthropology: A Critical Introduction by Brian Morris for $3.99

The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology) by Jaak Panksepp and Lucy Biven (W.W. Norton, 2012)

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

Book description from the publisher:

A look at the seven emotional systems of the brain by the researcher who discovered them.

What makes us happy? What makes us sad? How do we come to feel a sense of enthusiasm? What fills us with lust, anger, fear, or tenderness? Traditional behavioral and cognitive neuroscience have yet to provide satisfactory answers. The Archaeology of Mind presents an affective neuroscience approach—which takes into consideration basic mental processes, brain functions, and emotional behaviors that all mammals share—to locate the neural mechanisms of emotional expression. It reveals—for the first time—the deep neural sources of our values and basic emotional feelings.

This book elaborates on the seven emotional systems that explain how we live and behave. These systems originate in deep areas of the brain that are remarkably similar across all mammalian species. When they are disrupted, we find the origins of emotional disorders:

– SEEKING: how the brain generates a euphoric and expectant response

– FEAR: how the brain responds to the threat of physical danger and death

– RAGE: sources of irritation and fury in the brain

– LUST: how sexual desire and attachments are elaborated in the brain

– CARE: sources of maternal nurturance

– GRIEF: sources of non-sexual attachments

– PLAY: how the brain generates joyous, rough-and-tumble interactions

– SELF: a hypothesis explaining how affects might be elaborated in the brain

The book offers an evidence-based evolutionary taxonomy of emotions and affects and, as such, a brand-new clinical paradigm for treating psychiatric disorders in clinical practice.

Google Books preview:

Inner Experience and Neuroscience: Merging Both Perspectives by Donald D. Price and James J. Barrell (MIT Press, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

The study of consciousness has advanced rapidly over the last two decades. And yet there is no clear path to creating models for a direct science of human experience or for integrating its insights with those of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. In Inner Experience and Neuroscience, Donald Price and James Barrell show how a science of human experience can be developed through a strategy that integrates experiential paradigms with methods from the natural sciences. They argue that the accuracy and results of both psychology and neuroscience would benefit from an experiential perspective and methods. Price and Barrell describe phenomenologically based methods for scientific research on human experience, as well as their philosophical underpinnings, and relate these to empirical results associated with such phenomena as pain and suffering, emotions, and volition. They argue that the methods of psychophysics are critical for integrating experiential and natural sciences, describe how qualitative and quantitative methods can be merged, and then apply this approach to the phenomena of pain, placebo responses, and background states of consciousness. In the course of their argument, they draw on empirical results that include qualitative studies, quantitative studies, and neuroimaging studies. Finally, they propose that the integration of experiential and natural science can extend efforts to understand such difficult issues as free will and complex negative emotions including jealousy and greed.

free kindle ebook: Herbal Supplements & the Brain: Understanding Their Health Benefits & Hazards (FT Press Science) amazon.com/gp/product/B00…

— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) August 9, 2012

(Currently free in US Kindle store, but prices are subject to change and may vary by region.)

Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond by Robert R. Provine (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Robert Provine boldly goes where other scientists seldom tread—in search of hiccups, coughs, yawns, sneezes, and other lowly, undignified human behaviors. Upon investigation, these instinctive acts bear the imprint of our evolutionary origins and can be uniquely valuable tools for understanding how the human brain works and what makes us different from other species.

Many activities showcased in Curious Behavior are contagious, but none surpasses yawning in this regard—just reading the word can make one succumb. Though we often take it as a sign of sleepiness or boredom, yawning holds clues to the development of our sociality and ability to empathize with others. Its inescapable transmission reminds us that we are sometimes unaware, neurologically programmed beasts of the herd. Other neglected behaviors yield similar revelations. Tickling, we learn, may be the key to programming personhood into robots. Coughing comes in musical, medical, and social varieties. Farting and belching have import for the evolution of human speech. And prenatal behavior is offered as the strangest exhibit of all, defying postnatal logic in every way. Our earthiest acts define Homo sapiens as much as language, bipedalism, tool use, and other more studied characteristics.

As Provine guides us through peculiarities right under our noses, he beckons us to follow with self-experiments: tickling our own feet, keeping a log of when we laugh, and attempting to suppress yawns and sneezes. Such humble investigations provide fodder for grade school science projects as well as doctoral dissertations. Small Science can yield big rewards.