my mind on books

Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson (Harmony, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

Why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated?

Because your brain evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences but slowly from the good ones.

You can change this.

Hardwiring Happiness lays out a simple method that uses the hidden power of everyday experiences to build new neural structures full of happiness, love, confidence, and peace. Dr. Hanson’s four steps build strengths into your brain— balancing its ancient negativity bias—making contentment and a powerful sense of resilience the new normal. In mere minutes each day, we can transform our brains into refuges and power centers of calm and happiness.

See also: Author’s website, Book excerpt

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman (Harper, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

In Focus, Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, author of the #1 international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, offers a groundbreaking look at today’s scarcest resource and the secret to high performance and fulfillment: attention.

Combining cutting-edge research with practical findings, Focus delves into the science of attention in all its varieties, presenting a long overdue discussion of this little-noticed and under-rated mental asset. In an era of unstoppable distractions, Goleman persuasively argues that now more than ever we must learn to sharpen focus if we are to survive in a complex world.

Goleman boils down attention research into a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. Drawing on rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and business, he shows why high-achievers need all three kinds of focus, and explains how those who rely on Smart Practices—mindfulness meditation, focused preparation and recovery, positive emotions and connections, and mental “prosthetics” that help them improve habits, add new skills, and sustain greatness—excel while others do not.

Identity And Difference: John Locke And The Invention Of Consciousness by Etienne Balibar (Verso, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

John Locke’s foundational place in the history of British empiricism and liberal political thought is well established. So, in what sense can Locke be considered a modern European philosopher? Identity and Difference argues for reassessing this canonical figure. Closely examining the “treatise on identity” added to the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Étienne Balibar demonstrates Locke’s role in the formation of two concepts central to the metaphysics of the subject—consciousness and the self—and the complex philosophical, legal, moral and political nature of his terms.

With an accompanying essay by Stella Sandford, situating Balibar’s reading of Locke in the history of the reception of the Essay and within Balibar’s other writings on “the subject,” Identity and Difference rethinks a crucial moment in the history of Western philosophy.

Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman (Crown, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

We are profoundly social creatures – more than we know.

In Social, renowned psychologist Matthew Lieberman explores groundbreaking research in social neuroscience revealing that our need to connect with other people is even more fundamental, more basic, than our need for food or shelter.  Because of this, our brain uses its spare time to learn about the social world – other people and our relation to them. It is believed that we must commit 10,000 hours to master a skill.  According to Lieberman, each of us has spent 10,000 hours learning to make sense of people and groups by the time we are ten.

Social argues that our need to reach out to and connect with others is a primary driver behind our behavior.  We believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions.  Yet, new research using fMRI – including a great deal of original research conducted by Lieberman and his UCLA lab — shows that our brains react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as they do to physical pain and pleasure.  Fortunately, the brain has evolved sophisticated mechanisms for securing our place in the social world.  We have a unique ability to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, fears, and motivations, allowing us to effectively coordinate our lives with one another.  And our most private sense of who we are is intimately linked to the important people and groups in our lives.  This wiring often leads us to restrain our selfish impulses for the greater good.  These mechanisms lead to behavior that might seem irrational, but is really just the result of our deep social wiring and necessary for our success as a species.

Based on the latest cutting edge research, the findings in Social have important real-world implications.  Our schools and businesses, for example, attempt to minimalize social distractions.  But this is exactly the wrong thing to do to encourage engagement and learning, and literally shuts down the social brain, leaving powerful neuro-cognitive resources untapped.  The insights revealed in this pioneering book suggest ways to improve learning in schools, make the workplace more productive, and improve our overall well-being.

Preview:

See also: Author’s website

The Mind’s Construction: The Ontology of Mind and Mental Action by Matthew Soteriou (Oxford University Press, 2013)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Philosophers working on the ontology of mind have highlighted various distinctions that can be drawn between the ways in which different aspects of our minds fill time. For example, they note that whereas some elements of our mental lives obtain over time, others unfold over time, and some continue to occur throughout intervals of time. Matthew Soteriou explores ways in which such distinctions can be put to work in helping to inform philosophical accounts of both sensory and cognitive aspects of consciousness. Part One of The Mind’s Construction argues that work in the ontology of mind that focuses on distinctions of temporal character has much to contribute to philosophical accounts of the phenomenology of various elements of sensory consciousness–e.g. the phenomenology of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, and perceptual imagination. Part Two argues that these ontological considerations can inform our understanding of conscious thinking, and the form of self-conscious consciousness that we have as subjects capable of engaging in such activity, by helping to account for and explain the respect in which agency is exercised in conscious thinking. This in turn, it is argued, can illuminate the more general issue of the place and role of mental action in an account of the metaphysics of mind.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s webpage