my mind on books

$0.99 kindle ebook (short) on Amazon: ‘Writing, Dreams, and Consciousness’ by Kirsten Mortensen amazon.com/gp/product/B00… via @amazon

— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) March 14, 2013

One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea by Dana Becker (Oxford University Press, USA, 2013)

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Book description from the publisher:

Stress. Everyone is talking about it, suffering from it, trying desperately to manage it-now more than ever. From 1970 to 1980, 2,326 academic articles appeared with the word “stress” in the title. In the decade between 2000 and 2010 that number jumped to 21,750. Has life become ten times more stressful, or is it the stress concept itself that has grown exponentially over the past 40 years?

In One Nation Under Stress, Dana Becker argues that our national infatuation with the therapeutic culture has created a middle-class moral imperative to manage the tensions of daily life by turning inward, ignoring the social and political realities that underlie those tensions. Becker shows that although stress is often associated with conditions over which people have little control-workplace policies unfavorable to family life, increasing economic inequality, war in the age of terrorism-the stress concept focuses most of our attention on how individuals react to stress. A proliferation of self-help books and dire medical warnings about the negative effects of stress on our physical and emotional health all place the responsibility for alleviating stress-though yoga, deep breathing, better diet, etc.-squarely on the individual. The stress concept has come of age in a period of tectonic social and political shifts. Nevertheless, we persist in the all-American belief that we can meet these changes by re-engineering ourselves rather than tackling the root causes of stress.

Examining both research and popular representations of stress in cultural terms, Becker traces the evolution of the social uses of the stress concept as it has been transformed into an all-purpose vehicle for defining, expressing, and containing middle-class anxieties about upheavals in American society.

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Decomposing the Will (Philosophy of Mind Series), ed. by Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein, and Tillmann Vierkant (Oxford University Press, USA, 2013)

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Book description from the publisher:

There is growing evidence from the science of human behavior that our everyday, folk understanding of ourselves as conscious, rational, responsible agents may be radically mistaken. The science, some argue, recommends a view of conscious agency as merely epiphenomenal: an impotent accompaniment to the whirring unconscious machinery (the inner zombie) that prepares, decides and causes our behavior. The new essays in this volume display and explore this radical claim, revisiting the folk concept of the responsible agent after abandoning the image of a central executive, and “decomposing” the notion of the conscious will into multiple interlocking aspects and functions.

Part 1 of this volume provides an overview of the scientific research that has been taken to support “the zombie challenge.” In part 2, contributors explore the phenomenology of agency and what it is like to be the author of one’s own actions. Part 3 then explores different strategies for using the science and phenomenology of human agency to respond to the zombie challenge.

Questions explored include: what distinguishes automatic behavior and voluntary action? What, if anything, does consciousness contribute to the voluntary control of behavior? What does the science of human behavior really tell us about the nature of self-control?

Table of Contents
1. Decomposing the WIll: Meeting the Zombie Challenge , Tillmann Vierkant, Julian Kiverstein, and Andy Clark
PART ONE The Zombie Challenge
2. The Neuroscience of Volition , Adina L. Roskies
3. Beyond Libet: Long-term Prediction of Free Choices from Neuroimaging Signals , John-Dylan Haynes
4. Vetoing and Consciousness , Alfred R. Mele
5. From Determinism to Resignation; and How to Stop It , Richard Holton

PART TWO The Sense of Agency
6. From the Fact to the Sense of Agency , Manos Tsakiris and Aikaterini Fotopoulou
7. Ambiguity in the Sense of Agency , Shaun Gallagher
8. There’s Nothing Life Being Free: Default Dispositions, Judgments of Freedom, and the Phenomenology of Coercion , Fabio Paglieri
9. Agency as a Marker of Consciousness , Tim Bayne

PART THREE The Function of Conscious Control: Conflict Resolution, Emotion, and Mental Actions

10. Voluntary Action and the Three Forms of Binding in the Brain , Ezequiel Morsella, Tara C. Dennehy, and John A. Bargh
11. Emotion Regulation and Free Will , Nico H. Frijda
12. Action Control by Implementation Intentions: The Role of Discrete Emotions , Sam J. Maglio, Peter M. Gollwitzer, and Gabriele Oettingen
13. Mental Action and the Threat of Automaticity , Wayne Wu
14. Mental Acts as Natural Kinds , Jo^”elle Proust

PART FOUR Decomposed Accounts of the Will
15. Managerial Control and Free Mental Agency , Tillmann Vierkant
16. Recomposing the Will: Distributed Motivation and Computer-Mediated Extrospection , Lars Hall, Petter Johansson, and David de Leon
17. Situationism and Moral Responsibility: Free Will in Fragments , Manuel Vargas

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)

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Book description from the publisher:

A revelatory exploration of the hottest trend in technology and the dramatic impact it will have on the economy, science, and society at large.

Which paint color is most likely to tell you that a used car is in good shape? How can officials identify the most dangerous New York City manholes before they explode? And how did Google searches predict the spread of the H1N1 flu outbreak?

The key to answering these questions, and many more, is big data. “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.

In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.

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See also: free Kindle ebook Big Data Now: 2012 Edition from O’Reilly Media

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Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum (HarperBusiness, 2013)

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Book description from the publisher:

Offering insights from the spheres of anthropology, psychology, education, design, and business, Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, a leading thinker, commentator, and curator on the subjects of design, creativity, and innovation, is first book to identify and explore creative intelligence as a new form of cultural literacy and as a powerful method for problem-solving, driving innovation, and sparking start-up capitalism.

Nussbaum investigates the ways in which individuals, corporations, and nations are boosting their creative intelligence — CQ—and how that translates into their abilities to make new products and solve new problems. Ultimately, Creative Intelligence shows how to frame problems in new ways and devise solutions that are original and highly social.

Smart and eye opening, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire illustrates how to connect our creative output with a new type of economic system, Indie Capitalism, where creativity is the source of value, where entrepreneurs drive growth, and where social networks are the building blocks of the economy.