my mind on books

Besides new books by David Chalmers and Douglas Hofstadter mentioned in an earlier post, there are also new books coming later this year by Oliver Sacks and Antonio Damasio.

Coming in October – The Mind’s Eye by Oliver Sacks (Knopf, 2010). (link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

From the author of the best-selling Musicophilia (hailed as “luminous, original, and indispensable” by The American Scholar), an exploration of vision through the case histories of six individuals—including a renowned pianist who continues to give concerts despite losing the ability to read the score, and a neurobiologist born with crossed eyes who, late in life, suddenly acquires binocular vision, and how her brain adapts to that new skill. Most dramatically, Sacks gives us a riveting account of the appearance of a tumor in his own eye, the strange visual symptoms he observed, an experience that left him unable to perceive depth.

In The Mind’s Eye, Oliver Sacks explores some of the most fundamental facets of human experience—how we see in three dimensions, how we represent the world internally when our eyes are closed, and the remarkable, unpredictable ways that our brains find new ways of perceiving that create worlds as complete and rich as the no-longer-visible world.

Damasio’s book is coming in November from Pantheon: Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. (link for amazon.co.uk)

Product description from the publisher:

One of the most important and original neuroscientists at work today tackles a question that has confounded neurologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, and psychologists for centuries: how consciousness is created.

Antonio Damasio has spent the past thirty years studying and writing about how the brain operates, and his work has garnered acclaim for its singular melding of the scientific and the humanistic. In this revelatory work, he debunks the long-standing idea that consciousness is somehow separate from the body, presenting astounding new scientific evidence that consciousness—what we think of as “self”—is in fact a biological process created by the brain. Besides the three traditional perspectives used to study the mind (the personal, the behavioral, and the neurological), Damasio introduces the evolutionary perspective, which entails a radical change in the way the history of conscious minds is viewed and told.

Self Comes to Mind is a groundbreaking investigation of consciousness as a dynamic, unpredictable faculty that is instrumental in defining and explaining who we understand ourselves to be.