my mind on books

Mood: The Key to Understanding Ourselves and Others by Patrick M. Burke (Prometheus Books, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

A reader-friendly yet in-depth overview of the latest research on mood as the way we are tuned to the world.

This book examines the central role that mood plays in determining our outlook on life and our ability to cope with its challenges. The central theme is that mood determines how we are tuned to the world. Tuning emerges over the course of our earliest development as environmental and genetic influences form the neural circuits and set how they function across the lifespan in daily life and under conditions of stress. How each person is tuned becomes the basis for resilience or vulnerability to events. Some will take events in stride; others may become angry, anxious, or sad.

A child psychiatrist with decades of clinical experience treating patients, the author stresses that relationships play a central role in shaping our mood. Security or insecurity, loss or the fear of loss of key relationships, especially in childhood, can have telling effects on the way we view the world.

A chapter is devoted to each of the disorders where mood is a central issue: depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and antisocial disruptive disorders. The author then discusses the various “talking therapies” and the main classes of medication often administered to treat emotional disturbances. Burke concludes by summarizing the latest research on preventing mood disorders and discussing the impact that illness can have on emotional well-being and the role of mood in resilience and recovery.

Google Books preview:

Deep Learning: How the Mind Overrides Experience by Stellan Ohlsson (Cambridge University Press, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

Although the ability to retain, process, and project prior experience onto future situations is indispensable, the human mind also possesses the ability to override experience and adapt to changing circumstances. Cognitive scientist Stellan Ohlsson analyzes three types of deep, non-monotonic cognitive change: creative insight, adaptation of cognitive skills by learning from errors, and conversion from one belief to another, incompatible belief. For each topic, Ohlsson summarizes past research, re-formulates the relevant research questions, and proposes information-processing mechanisms that answer those questions. The three theories are based on the principles of redistribution of activation, specialization of practical knowledge, and re-subsumption of declarative information. Ohlsson develops the implications of those mechanisms by scaling their effects with respect to time, complexity, and social interaction. The book ends with a unified theory of non-monotonic cognitive change that captures the abstract properties that the three types of change share.

Google Books preview:

See also: Author’s webpage

Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom (Crown, 2013)

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

Book description from the publisher:

A leading cognitive scientist argues that a deep sense of good and evil is bred in the bone.

From John Locke to Sigmund Freud, philosophers and psychologists have long believed that we begin life as blank moral slates. Many of us take for granted that babies are born selfish and that it is the role of society—and especially parents—to transform them from little sociopaths into civilized beings. In Just Babies, Paul Bloom argues that humans are in fact hardwired with a sense of morality. Drawing on groundbreaking research at Yale, Bloom demonstrates that, even before they can speak or walk, babies judge the goodness and badness of others’ actions; feel empathy and compassion; act to soothe those in distress; and have a rudimentary sense of justice.

Still, this innate morality is limited, sometimes tragically. We are naturally hostile to strangers, prone to parochialism and bigotry. Bringing together insights from psychology, behavioral economics, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Bloom explores how we have come to surpass these limitations. Along the way, he examines the morality of chimpanzees, violent psychopaths, religious extremists, and Ivy League professors, and explores our often puzzling moral feelings about sex, politics, religion, and race.
In his analysis of the morality of children and adults, Bloom rejects the fashionable view that our moral decisions are driven mainly by gut feelings and unconscious biases. Just as reason has driven our great scientific discoveries, he argues, it is reason and deliberation that makes possible our moral discoveries, such as the wrongness of slavery. Ultimately, it is through our imagination, our compassion, and our uniquely human capacity for rational thought that we can transcend the primitive sense of morality we were born with, becoming more than just babies.

Paul Bloom has a gift for bringing abstract ideas to life, moving seamlessly from Darwin, Herodotus, and Adam Smith to The Princess Bride, Hannibal Lecter, and Louis C.K. Vivid, witty, and intellectually probing, Just Babies offers a radical new perspective on our moral lives.

Google Books preview:

See also: Conversation with the author (pdf)

Philosophical Psychopathology: Philosophy without Thought Experiments by Garry Young (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

(amazon.co.uk)

Book description from the publisher:

Garry Young presents examples of rare pathological conditions such as blindsight, anarchic hand, alien control and various delusional states to inform fundamental questions on topics relating to consciousness, intentional action, thought and rationality, as well as what is required to possess certain kinds of knowledge. Rather than trying to answer these questions by inventing far-fetched scenario or ‘thought experiments’, this book argues that there is a better but, at present, under-used resource available: namely, clinical case studies evidence. Thus, when inquiry as to whether consciousness must necessarily accompany our intentional action, instead of creating a philosophical zombie why not look to the actions of those suffering from blindsight or visual agnosia. Similarly, when considering whether it is possible to doubt that one thinks, why invent a malicious demon as Descartes did when one can draw on delusional evidence from those suffering from thought insertion who deny certain thoughts are theirs.

See also: Sample chapter available through publisher (pdf), Author at PhilPapers

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— Debbie A Foster (@mymindonbooks) November 9, 2013